As I begin my second year of law school, I have found myself thinking more critically about what I actually mean when I use the word “justice.” In my first year, so much of legal education focused on understanding the rules: What law was broken? What constitutional right or statute was implicated? What procedure must be followed? These questions are essential to our legal system, but the more I learn about criminal law, the more I find myself questioning whether they tell us everything we need to know about the law and justice.
Reading a current blog post by Impartials founder has led me to think about this question through a lens of restorative justice. Rather than centering the criminal legal process around punishment, restorative justice asks different questions: Who was harmed? What do they need? Who is responsible for repairing that harm? These questions feel particularly meaningful to me as a law student because they challenge some of the assumptions that are so deeply embedded in the legal system I am learning to navigate. As someone who has personal experience with the impact of crime and the justice system, these questions are a lot closer to what my family needed answered during the hardest of times.
The traditional criminal legal system is largely structured around the relationship between the state and the person accused of a crime. When a crime occurs, the government determines whether a law was violated and follows the procedure of prosecution and sentencing. The victim may have an important role in that process, but the case ultimately belongs to the state. Restorative justice offers a different framework. It recognizes that a crime does not simply violate a law, it harms real people on both sides of the situation.
A prison sentence may satisfy the legal requirement of punishment without addressing the victim’s questions, the offender’s understanding of the harm they caused, or the broader damage experienced by a community. Instead of asking only what punishment someone deserves, restorative approaches can ask what they can do to acknowledge the harm they caused and begin repairing it.
As a law student, I find this intersection especially interesting because incorporating restorative justice into the legal system raises difficult questions. How can we incorporate restorative principles without sacrificing the legal protections that are essential to a fair criminal process? I do not think these questions have simple answers. Restorative justice cannot be treated as a solution to every problem within the criminal justice system. But I think it offers an important challenge to the way we legal-minded people traditionally understand justice. It asks us to look beyond the legal process and consider whether the people affected by a crime have actually been supported. Which is something my family personally was deeply missing.
As I begin my second year of law school, I am realizing that learning the law is not just about learning how the system works. It is also about learning to question whether the system is accomplishing what we want it to accomplish. Perhaps the goal should not simply be to determine whether a law was broken and how the person responsible should be punished. If the law can make room for some different perspectives, perhaps we can build a legal system that does more than punish.