Vol. 11 No. 6 (June 2001) pp. 308-310.

HANDBOOK OF JUSTICE RESEARCH IN LAW by Joseph Sanders and V. Lee Hamilton (Editors). New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers, 2001. 388 pp. Cloth $95.00. ISBN: 0-306-46340-7.

Reviewed by Susan O. White, Department of Political Science, University of New Hampshire.

This volume is a handbook, and it does what handbooks are supposed to do. It reviews and summarizes areas of research, with analytical commentary and suggestions for future research. It is, therefore, a useful addition to any scholarly library. It will be especially valuable for those political scientists who are interested in law and society because it covers a wide range of research from other social science disciplines.

The focus of the volume is on issues of justice in the context of law and legal institutions, and specifically on empirical social science research into the behavioral consequences and implications of perceptions of justice. Three chapters provide extensive analyses of psychological research on what the editors call the "dimensions of justice"--retribution, procedural justice, and distributive justice. There follows five chapters that focus on specific examples of how questions of justice arise and are dealt with in legal practice--lawyer-client relations, juvenile court, civil disputes involving regulatory and administrative agencies, mediation, and the legal battles over the gender wage gap. The final two chapters discuss different aspects of the cultural contexts that affect and are affected by perceptions of justice.

The editors open the volume with a clear and informative introduction that sets forth the conceptual framework for the book and summarizes the contributions by various scholars in the following chapters. In this introduction, the editors emphasize that their interest is in empirical questions about justice in legal settings. However, they suggest that these questions arise primarily because normative debates over issues of justice are often arguments over empirical assumptions. Testing these empirical assumptions, and revealing the further questions that arise in the process, are the overall themes of the book.

Neil Vidmar, a psychologist teaching in a law school, tackles the commonplace topic of retribution and shows that recent research has made it anything but common. The chapter reviews some well-known findings about the relationship between retribution and a desire for revenge within a lucid framework of concepts such as proportionality. Vidmar discusses, for example, social-psychological findings that illuminate the issue of whether the attitudes of victims comport with the social norms that underlie criminal sanctions and findings that reveal how the retributive homeostasis model of "setting things right" fits with victim and societal attitudes toward punishment. He also extensively reviews the research on arousal to anger. Of particular interest is his discussion of whether institutional mechanisms such as criminal sanctions are related to the societal

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goal of containing aggression and violence. For example, the recent research by Nisbett and Cohen on the role of insult in certain cultural settings, applied especially to the different levels of violence between southern and northern United States, makes one think differently about broader questions of cultural socialization to a cycle of violence. Their creative experiments reveal the importance of social-psychological research to policy debates over the causes of violence. A secondary but important contribution of this chapter is the fact that Vidmar's analyses are not only about findings but also about the complex methodological issues in this field.

Psychologists Tom Tyler and Allan Lind, who together and with other colleagues have made procedural justice an important area of justice research in recent years, contributed the chapter on this topic. They review the well-known theoretical forerunners such as exchange theory and equity theory as well as John Thibault and Laurens Walker's seminal work on the fairness of decision-making procedures. The latter made the important finding that procedures, which provide opportunities for "voice," are important enough to bolster someone's acceptance of the outcome even if it is unfavorable. Eventually, Tyler and Lind broadened the scope of their work on procedural justice to societal issues such as legitimacy and compliance. In this chapter they discuss how procedural justice research has expanded to cover a variety of issue areas and types of disputes. Their own work has extended to cross-cultural studies of fairness and brought to prominence what they call "group-value theory" as a theoretical base for understanding perceptions of fairness. In some formulations, this group value model sounds like watered down social contract theory, but political scientists should find informative the variety of settings and issue areas that provide empirical findings on how people respond to fundamental aspects of a social contract. Of particular interest are their discussions of "trust," "neutrality," and "standing" as motivational bases for group self-identity and, therefore, legitimacy and compliance with authority. Their review of the most recent studies in this expanding literature is especially valuable.

The third "dimension of justice"-distributive justice-is reviewed by sociologists Karen A. Hegtvedt and Karen S. Cook. They acknowledge that procedural justice research has overtaken distributive justice research as a focus in the literature on justice. Perhaps this is because the theoretical focus on equity (desert) versus equality versus need as a base for allocation decisions has become somewhat stagnant, with multiple studies showing similar results over time. The value of this chapter is its discussion of the variety of settings and factors that have been studied in distributive justice research. For example, they review research on allocations within organizations, on personal and interpersonal factors, on situational and cross-cultural factors, and on reactions to perceived injustice. Their review is especially valuable for political scientists interested in allocational policy areas, such as health care, who might not be aware of the extensive literature on perceptions of and behavioral responses to distributive justice.

The chapters by Felstiner and Pettit on lawyer-client relations and by Feld on juvenile court are competently done and useful as literature reviews, but provide little new information. The chapter by political scientists Robert Howard and John Scholz is an interesting discussion of agency justice and their view that justice in this context can be formulated as the minimization of errors.

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Their fundamental argument is that "injustice occurs when an agency makes a mistake in interpreting just policies." The policies are just when laws are passed in accordance with the will of the people, and therefore errors toward either leniency or stringency are unjust. The authors discuss a variety of decision-making factors (e.g., ambiguous laws), settings (regulatory and administrative agencies), and policy areas (e.g., Medicaid).

Deborah Hensler, a political scientist long affiliated with RAND and now at Stanford Law School, knows more about dispute resolution research than anyone else on earth (probably). She has contributed an interesting review of the history of alternative dispute resolution and the search for "good" mediation. The tension between true believers and facts is well documented, as is the difficulty of obtaining valid data on mediation procedures and outcomes. Most of ADR is not in the public arena so the normal access researchers have to legal outcomes is severely curtailed. The shift of so much disputing activity to private arenas is both fascinating and troubling for anyone trained in what used to be called "public law." Hensler's review of several ADR programs is informative, as are her discussions of her many experiences dealing with them and their (often powerful) adherents.

Sociologists Robert Nelson and William Bridges provide an intriguing discussion of the policy battles over what they term "wage justice for women." They review extensive findings in various settings and eventually argue against comparable worth because they do not think it can be effective over time. Instead, they conclude that the gender gap in wages has been overwhelmingly the result of judicial ideology based on the "dominant discourse" on gender inequality. The conclusion will not surprise most law and courts political scientists, but their findings and analyses are illuminating.

The chapter on "Gender, Law and Justice" by Jill McCorkel, Frederika Schmitt and Valerie Hans is an extensive review of the various feminist literatures, including liberal feminists and the debate over equal treatment, difference feminists (e.g., Gilligan), radical feminists (e.g., Dworkin), critical feminists (e.g., MacKinnon), and postmodernist legal feminists (e.g., Frug). They go on to explore the literature on gendered institutions, rape law reform, domestic violence, sexual harassment, and other aspects of law-in-action. Their careful and balanced review of empirical evidence should be useful to political scientists who do not always keep up with developments the disciplines of sociology, social psychology and anthropology. The last chapter provides a helpful summary of the newly expanding field of cross-cultural studies of perceptions of justice. The authors, Kwok Leung and Michael Morris, cover various cultures, comparing them according to such theoretical concepts as the effects of power distance and individualism-collectivism. Theirs is an interesting exploration of comparative issues involving justice questions.

All in all, this book is an important contribution to interdisciplinary literacy in our field and as such should be useful to any law and courts political scientist. The book is well-conceived and the authors are prominent researchers in their various fields. I did not always agree with their conclusions but they have presented their fields thoroughly and intelligently. The book is expensive-but, after all, it is a handbook.