2 Formal court processes as a means of repair

In many Western societies, formal court processes include criminal, civil, family courts; tribunals; magistrates’ courts and several others. Figure 2 below provides a high level overview of the court system in England and Wales, detailing the different types of courts that operate.

While legal and court systems protect legal rights, and provide avenues by which formal action can be taken, they also limit what can and cannot be taken into account.

In 1977, Norwegian criminologist, Nils Christie wrote an article in the British Journal of Criminology entitled ‘Conflicts as Property’. In this article, Christie persuasively argues that when court systems, lawyers and even criminologists become involved in conflicts, they tend to act in ways that mean the voices of victims and those accused of crimes are not fully heard. Christie is not advocating for private vengeance. Instead, he suggests reorienting court proceedings in ways that allow for more specific detail and complexity to be brought out in the open – both for the benefit of those directly involved and for wider society. Christie’s article focuses particularly on criminal court proceedings, but his arguments would apply to many other formal court processes.

Christie’s work is relevant to the ideas of rupture and repair that were discussed in the previous section of this course. He acknowledges that conflicts are important features of society. Ruptures or conflicts should be carefully understood and made visible so that those concerned can be fully seen and listened to, and so that society at large can learn from them. The concepts of rupture and repair follow on from the ideas of Christie, though he did not use those terms. Prevalent ideas around the concept of rupture were initially developed in psychology and have tended to focus on the interpersonal relationship between two people; for example, between parent and child or client and therapist. However, transposing the idea of rupture (and the accompanying need for repair) to wider social relationships presents new approaches to understanding the ways in which legal and court systems work to remove conflicts or problems from their rightful owners.