Why Restorative Justice? - Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation

Chapter 3
A Brief History
Restorative justice is not a new idea. In England it formed the basis
of Anglo-Saxon law before the Normans arrived. It was part of
many earlier legal traditions, including Roman law. It was inserted
in the earliest known written laws, the Code of Hammurabi of
c.2000 BC. 4 Most traditional systems of justice in Africa and Asia
were based on restorative justice. Aboriginal and Native American
justice is based on restoration and reparation. In these societies,
justice between people is inextricably linked to the religious and
everyday framework of the people whose lives it affects. The
philosophy of restorative justice embraces a wide range of human
attributes: healing, compassion, forgiveness and mercy – as well as
mediation and reconciliation, and sanctions when appropriate.
After the Norman Conquest, William the Conqueror turned
the justice system in England away from the restorative model. He
defined crime as disruption of ‘the king’s peace’ and fined offenders
in the King’s Courts, in part to benefit the king’s pocket. English
monarchs increasingly took the revenue from reparative justice in
their kingdoms, for financial and political reasons. Their control of
the judiciary reinforced their power by linking local justice back to
the crown. Kings justified their intervention on the grounds that the
wrong done to an individual extended beyond his family because it
affected the community. This model of justice asserts that crime
harms the state, and that the state should react by punishing the
offender. Thus today legal procedures invariably begin with some
version of ‘Rex/Regina v’ or ‘The People vs’. 5
4 D. van Ness, ed., Restorative Justice: Theory and practice (Washington DC, Justice Fellowship,1989).
5 For an in-depth discussion of the history of justice in relation to mediation and restoration,
see M. Wright, Justice for Victims and Offenders, 2nd edn (Winchester, Waterside Press, 1996),
pp. 22–32.
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