Non-Adversarial Justice: The Changing Role of Courtroom Participants in an Indigenous Sentencing Court pages-115-125
This paper forms part of a wider sociolinguistic study of cultural and language disadvantage for Indigenous offenders in the criminal justice system. It examines the changing role of courtroom participants in an Indigenous sentencing court such as the Koori Court of Victoria, and how this may lead to a better quality of justice for this disadvantaged cultural group. The problem under review is the high percentage of Indigenous offenders who continue to come in contact with the law. The key aim of the research is to determine if issues of miscommunication identified by academics over the past three decades continue to be reflected in the court process, or whether an awareness of cultural and language difference by participants at the Koori Court hearing leads to a more restorative and therapeutic outcome for Indigenous offenders. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, the study investigates the role of participants and the communicative process in a conventional court and compares this with the non-adversarial Koori Court. There are now seven adult and two children’s Koori Courts in Victoria, established under the jurisdiction of the Magistrates’ Court of Victoria, and one County Koori Court, Australia’s only Indigenous court in a higher jurisdiction for more serious cases. This paper will illustrate how new forms of court practice lead to improved interaction between courtroom professionals and other key participants such as the offender and Indigenous Elders, in order to best achieve a positive outcome.
Restorative Justice & Responsive Regulation
Braithwaite's argument against punitive justice systems and for restorative justice systems establishes that there are good theoretical and empirical grounds for anticipating that well designed restorative justice processes will restore victims, offenders, and communities better than existing criminal justice practices. Counterintuitively, he also shows that a restorative justice system may deter, incapacitate, and rehabilitate more effectively than a punitive system. This is particularly true when the restorative justice system is embedded in a responsive regulatory framework that opts for deterrence only after restoration repeatedly fails, and incapacitation only after escalated deterrence fails. Braithwaite's empirical research demonstrates that active deterrence under the dynamic regulatory pyramid that is a hallmark of the restorative justice system he supports, is far more effective than the passive deterrence that is notable in the stricter "sentencing grid" of current criminal justice systems.
Annual review article: Is it time to rethink the gender agenda in entrepreneurship research?
This article develops a critique of contemporary approaches to analysing the impact of gender upon entrepreneurial propensity and activity. Since the 1990s, increasing attention has been afforded to the influence of gender on women’s entrepreneurial behaviour; such analyses have highlighted an embedded masculinity within the entrepreneurial discourse which privileges men as normative entrepreneurial actors. While invaluable in revealing a prevailing masculine bias within entrepreneurship, this critique is bounded by positioning women as a proxy for the gendered subject. This is a potentially limiting analysis that does not fully recognise gender as a human property with myriad articulations enacted throughout entrepreneurial activity. To progress debate, we engage more deeply with the notion of gender as a multiplicity, exploring the implications of such for future studies of entrepreneurial activity.