Columbia Law School Scholarship Archive Faculty Scholarship Faculty Publications 2003 Theorizing Community Justice Through Community Courts Jeffery Fagan Columbia Law School,
[email protected] Victoria Malkin Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/faculty_scholarship Part of the Courts Commons, and the Law and Society Commons Recommended Citation Jeffery Fagan & Victoria Malkin, Theorizing Community Justice Through Community Courts, 30 FORDHAM URB. L. J. 897 (2003). Available at: https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/faculty_scholarship/505 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Faculty Publications at Scholarship Archive. It has been accepted for inclusion in Faculty Scholarship by an authorized administrator of Scholarship Archive. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. THEORIZING COMMUNITY JUSTICE THROUGH COMMUNITY COURTSt Jeffrey Fagan* and Victoria Malkin** INTRODUCTION Community justice practitioners argue that the justice system has long ignored its biggest clients-citizens and neighborhoods that suffer the everyday consequences of high crime levels.' One re- sponse from legal elites has been a package of court innovations and new practices known as "community justice," part of a broader appeal to "community" and "partnership" common now in modern discourse on crime control.2 This concept incorporates several con- temporary visions and expressions of justice within the popular and legal literatures: problem-solving courts (such as drug courts, mental health courts, domestic violence courts, gun courts, and, of course, juvenile courts); the inclusion of victims and communities in the sanction process; community policing; partnerships between citizens and legal institutions; and alternative models of dispute resolution.' t This research was supported by from the National Institute of Justice.