Abstract
Over the last thirty years, the use of restorative justice within and adjacent to state juvenile and criminal proceedings, including community contexts, has expanded significantly in the United States. As such, what once could be fairly characterized by scholars as a norm and practice at the legal margins has moved widely into the mainstream. As increased legal institutionalization occurred, so too has scholarly attention. Shifting away from foundational “first generation” theoretical and empirical legal studies of practices and programs, a second stream of interdisciplinary legal scholarship has emerged centralizing structural questions as to the legalization of restorative justice. In this literature, researchers approach restorative justice statutes, codes and court rules from a range of vantage points including comparative examinations of patterns of adoption, assessments of the durability and operationalization, and systematic typological analyses. The prevailing scholarship, however, has limitations. This Article attends to one such gap and presents the first systematic review of “protective” restorative justice laws—those that create procedural protections for restorative justice through confidentiality, admissibility, and privilege. Drawing on an original dataset of state laws passed over a seventeen-year period, the study descriptively identifies, synthesizes and differentiates between these laws with the central aim of more fully articulating for scholars, policymakers, attorneys, and practitioners an integrated understanding of the American criminal law restorative justice regime.
Recommended Citation
Thalia Gonzalez and Aidan Lorraine Tomlinson,
Protecting (Restorative) Justice: An Analysis of Confidentiality, Admissibility and Privilege Provisions in State Law,
105 Neb. L. Rev. 53
(2026).
Available at: https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/nlr/vol105/iss1/5