The Roots and Reach of Restorative Justice

1. The Restorative Garden 2. How the Garden Grew: Restorative Justice in the Criminal Legal System 3. Tending and Fencing: Emerging Tensions with the Growth of Restorative Justice 4. From Grassroots to Governance: Restorative Justice in Northern Ireland 5. Emerging Gardens of Restorative Justice 6. Conditions for Flourishing

Biography

Meredith Rossner is Professor of Criminology and Lead of the Crime and Social Justice Programme at the POLIS: The Centre for Social Policy Research at the ANU. Her research focuses on emotions, rituals, the built environment, and technology in justice practices. Meredith has published widely in the field of restorative justice, including her 2013 book, Just Emotions: Rituals of Restorative Justice.  She is on the editorial board of the International Journal of Restorative Justice, a member of the Canberra Restorative Community and the Oceania Network of Restorative Practice for Sexual Harm.  

Helen Taylor is a Senior Lecturer at POLIS: The Centre for Social Policy Research at the Australian National University. Her research interests span restorative justice, policing and technology, and hate crime. Her key publications in the field of restorative justice include "The transformative potential of restorative justice: What the mainstream can learn from the margins”, Annual Review of Criminology with Meredith Rossner and "Finding common ground: Reconstructing criminology with epistemic justice”, Modern Criminal Law Review with Meredith Rossner and Elfie Shiosaki.

Rossner and Taylor deftly deploy a gardening metaphor for the nurture of restorative justice as a transformative project. The metaphor works to the point where this book is a major moment in the very history of the roots of restorative justice that it seeks to understand. Gardens grow through interactions of natural conditions and purposive human nurture. Gardening is a cultivated art of living that mobilizes human networks, nodes, and champions that include researchers. Entrainment is a central theoretical idea in the emotional dynamics of how the authors brilliantly theorize the cultivation of a landscape of planting that renews humankind with nature. Yet the connections planted grow something new for a better future. By restoring nature through relational work, humans discover together how to restore themselves.

John Braithwaite, Emeritus  Professor, School of Regulation and Global Governance (RegNet), Australian National University

The Roots and Reach of Restorative Justice is a timely, thoughtful, and important contribution to the field. Rossner and Taylor's garden metaphor does more than organize the book; it offers a powerful relational analysis of restorative justice itself, illuminating how encounters, institutions, communities, and movements are connected in the work of justice transformation. The book helps us understand that restorative justice does not flourish simply because it is adopted, scaled, or institutionalized. It must be cultivated through relationships, sustained practice, critical reflection, and care for the conditions in which it grows. In this way, the book both explains and contributes to the future of the field. It will help a new generation understand the promise of restorative justice and equip future champions to grow it with integrity.

Jennifer Llewellyn, Professor of Law and Chair in Restorative Justice, Schulich School of Law, Dalhousie University; Director, Restorative Lab

The Roots and Reach of Restorative Justice explores the evolutionary development of restorative justice from the early experiments in the 1970s with youth crime, through the 1990s with reintegrative shaming experiments and the 2000s with legislative embedding of the concept such as in Northern Ireland, to its deployment in the last 20 years into other areas of crime including environmental crime. The book is an exemplar of legal imagination, interdisciplinary scholarship, poetic language and persuasive argument. The authors' careful cultivation of the gardens of restorative justice yields a bounty for the literature in this field of discourse.

The Hon. Justice Brian Preston, Chief Judge, Land and Environment Court of New South Wales