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The public's trust in legal authorities has declined precipitously in recent years, along with a slip in the perceived legitimacy of these authorities. Prosecutors are no exception. Amidst growing debate about their contributions to social ills like mass incarceration, prosecutors have faced mounting pressure for greater accountability in their decision-making. Studies on the police and courts provide insight into a possible solution. This body of work has long shown that a critical framework through which the public views legal authorities is the perceived fairness of their decision-making processes, including the provision of explanations these authorities provide for their legal decisions. Thus, accountability, legitimacy, and trust in the eyes of the public rests, in part, on evaluating the fairness of decision-making processes, which itself requires the ability to distinguish between legal authorities' use of what the law and the public consider appropriate and inappropriate criteria when making legal decisions. Such evaluations can only occur when the factors that shape these decisions are known. Therefore, transparency in legal authorities' decision-making is core to the project of maintaining and building legitimacy and trust. However, as scholars have observed, prosecutorial decision-making largely occurs within a black box, rendering prosecutors' lack of transparency an obstacle to accountability, and in turn, legitimacy, and trust. In this Essay, we argue that an empirical methodology called 'process-tracing' can peer inside the black box of prosecutorial decision-making to help identify the factors that shape prosecutors' legal decisions, thus increasing transparency in their decision-making overall. As such, this methodology is helpful in several ways. First, it allows prosecutors to compare what factors actually drive their charging decisions to a normative legal framework so that they can adjust their behavior to better adhere to such standards. Second, it enables prosecutors to compare those factors with what the public considers to be important regarding prosecution. And third, it supplies prosecutors with a data-driven way to explain the reasoning behind their decisions to the public. Thus, prosecutors can highlight where their decision-making aligns with the public's views of prosecution to reinforce accountability, legitimacy, and trust. Where alignment with the public is weak, prosecutors can identify the legal factors influencing their decisions to promote accountability, legitimacy, and trust. Looking to the future of prosecution, a process-tracing approach provides a basis for a more nuanced, data-driven way to address prosecutorial reform--that is, reform grounded in the idea of building authentic trust between the public and legal authorities like prosecutors., Introduction 1155 I. The Power of Prosecutorial Discretion 1159 A. The Legal Framework Governing Prosecutors' Charging Decisions 1160 B. The Prior Empirical Work on Prosecutors' Charging Decisions 1163 II. Shining [...]

Introduction I. Background: Unrepresented Litigants in a Lawyer-Dominated Environment II. The Subjective Experience of Litigants: Empirical Findings to Date A. Procedural Justice Criteria: Voice, Representation, and Participation B. Voice in [...]

The article discusses the views of Jack B. Weinstein, Judge of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York, on relationship of aggregate litigation to legitimacy. Topics discussed include Weinstein's structuring the management of aggregation; importance of Supreme Court legitimacy; and role of the courts in facilitating the goal of maintaining legitimacy in American litigation system.

In this lecture I argue for the value of a self-regulatory approach to law and criminal justice. I do so by first describing and critiquing the dominant approach to regulation in use today: deterrence. I suggest that in practice this model is costly and minimally effective in securing compliance with the law and motivating the acceptance of decisions made by police officers and judges. I then outline a different, self-regulatory model which focuses on engaging people's values as a basis for motivating voluntary deference to the law. I review empirical research suggesting that this strategy is both viable and more desirable than current sanction-based approaches. My argument is that this approach is particularly important when the goal is voluntary compliance with the law and/or willing cooperation with legal authorities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Past research indicates that legitimacy encourages compliance with the law. This study extends consideration of the influence of legitimacy by exploring its impact on cooperation with the police and with neighbors to combat crime in one's community. It uses a panel study design and focuses upon the residents of New York City. The study finds that legitimacy shapes cooperation with the police and has a lesser influence on cooperation with others in the community. Consistent with the findings of prior research, legitimacy itself is found to be linked to the justice of the procedures used by the police to exercise their authority. Finally, the study explores the influence of personal experience with the police on legitimacy and cooperation. Results suggest that experiencing procedural justice during a personal experience increases legitimacy, irrespective of the favorability of the outcome. These results suggest that the police can generally enhance their legitimacy by using fair procedures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two studies are presented which test whether justice can motivate support for government policies and authorities even when such support is not in people's obvious personal or group interest. In the first study, White San Francisco Bay area residents' attitudes toward Congressionally-authored affirmative action policies and antidiscrimination laws were investigated. In the second study, African-American San Francisco Bay area residents' feelings of obligation to obey the law were investigated. The results from both studies show a significant relationship between evaluations of social justice and respondents' political attitudes. More importantly, a significant relationship between relational evaluations of Congress and political attitudes is found in both studies. This relationship suggests how justice can motivate policy and government support even if such support does not yield direct personal or group benefits. Finally, the results from both studies indicate when instrumental and relational concerns will be related to political attitudes. If people identified with their particular advantaged or disadvantaged group, instrumental concerns were more strongly related to their political attitudes, but if people identified with a superordinate category that included both potential outgroup members and relevant superordinate authorities, relational concerns were more strongly related to their political attitudes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this study is to explore the role of perceived injustice in generating dissatisfaction with legal authorities. Using data collected in interviews with a sample of defendants in traffic and misdemeanor court, I compare the influence of case outcomes upon attitudes toward judges and courts to that of distributive and procedural justice, The results suggest that among the defendants studied the major determinant of satisfaction with legal authorities is perceived fairness. Once the influence of perceived fairness is considered, ease outcomes explain no additional variation in attitudes toward courts and judges. In the conclusion, possible implications of this finding are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A "litigation mentality" increasingly pervades today's workplace, as an ever wider variety of managerial decisions are the target of employee-initiated lawsuits. In this paper we identify different psychological factors that could explain why employees consider suing their employers. One group of factors suggests that employee consideration of litigation is motivated primarily by self-interest, as employers perceive they have more to gain than lose by going to court. A second group of factors suggests that employees' decision to go to court is influenced largely by the perceived fairness of their dealings with the organization. In a survey of 141 currently employed workers, we found that the perceived fairness of organizational rules and procedures was the primary factor influencing whether employees consider a litigious response. In particular, employees were concerned about how the rules and procedures were implemented and the quality of interpersonal treatment received from managers. Job satisfaction also had an impact on employees considering litigation. We argue that while our findings support organizational efforts to create more formalized policies and procedures that emphasize due process or procedural justice, such efforts, in and of themselves, may undermine the intended goal of ensuring fairness and reducing employee litigation. The solution to this dilemma is not in the creation of formal procedures per se, but in the moral and interpersonal conduct of those implementing the procedures. We conclude by identifying directions for future research on employee litigation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]