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22 Law & Soc'y Rev. 103 (1988)
What Is Procedural Justice - Criteria Used by Citizens to Assess the Fairness of Legal Procedures

handle is hein.journals/lwsocrw22 and id is 107 raw text is: WHAT IS PROCEDURAL JUSTICE?: CRITERIA USED BY CITIZENS TO ASSESS THE FAIRNESS OF LEGAL PROCEDURES TOM R. TYLER This paper examines procedural justice in the context of citizen experiences with the police and courts. It is based on interviews of 652 citizens with recent personal experiences involving those authori- ties. I will consider two issues: first, whether the justice of the pro- cedures involved influences citizen satisfaction with outcomes and evaluations of legal authorities; and second, how citizens define fair process in such settings. The results replicate those of past studies, which found that procedural justice has a major influence on both satisfaction and evaluation. They further suggest that such proce- dural justice judgments are complex and multifaceted. Seven issues make independent contributions to citizen judgments about whether the legal authorities acted fairly: (1) the degree to which those au- thorities were motivated to be fair; (2) judgments of their honesty; (3) the degree to which the authorities followed ethical principles of conduct; (4) the extent to which opportunities for representation were provided; (5) the quality of the decisions made; (6) the opportu- nities for error correction; and (7) whether the authorities behaved in a biased fashion. I found that the meaning of procedural justice varied according to the nature of the situation, not the characteristics of the people involved. I. INTRODUCTION In 1975 Thibaut and Walker hypothesized that litigants' satis- faction with dispute resolution decisions would be independently influenced by their judgments about the fairness of the dispute resolution process. This hypothesis was strongly supported by their data and by subsequent research (see Casper, Tyler, and Fisher, in press; Landis and Goodstein, 1986; Lind, 1982; Lind and Tyler, 1988; Tyler, 1987c; Tyler and Lind, 1986; and Walker and Lind, 1984). In addition, procedural justice concerns have been found to influence evaluations of the legal authorities and institu- The data utilized in this paper were collected using funds provided by the National Science Foundation program in Law and Social Science, Grant SES- 8310199. Support for analyzing that data and writing this article was provided by the National Science Foundation, the American Bar Foundation, and the Northwestern University Center for Urban Affairs and Policy Research. I would like to thank Jonathan Casper, E. Allan Lind, Jo Perry, and Christo- pher Winship for comments on a draft of this paper. LAW & SOCIETY REVIEW, Volume 22, Number 1 (1988)