How do ordinary people experience and make sense of the informal justice system? Drawing on original data with British and German users of Ombudsmen an important institution of informal justice, Naomi Creutzfeldt offers a nuanced comparative answer to this question. In so doing, she takes current debates on procedural justice and legal consciousness forward. This book explores consciousness around alternatives to formal legality and asks how situated assumptions about law and fairness guide people's understandings of the informal justice system. Creutzfeldt shows that the everyday relationship that people have with the informal justice system is shaped by their experiences and expectations of the formal legal system and its agents. This book is an innovative theoretical and empirical statement about the future prospects for informal justice in Europe.
PART ONE: SETTING THE SCENE.- Chapter 1. Ombudsmen and informal justice.- Chapter 2. Europes Informal justice systems.- Chapter 3. Models of ombudsmen.- Chapter 4. Procedural justice and legal consciousness: questions of theory and practise.- PART TWO: EMPIRICAL DISCOVERIES.- Chapter 5. Expectations and perceptions of Ombudsmen in cross-national comparison.- Chapter 6. Everyday assumptions about ombudsmen.- PART THREE: THE FUTURE OF INFORMAL JUSTICE SYSTEMS.- Chapter 7. A European informal justice system?.- Chapter 8. Growing informal justice (from the inside-out).- Chapter 9. Paths for theory and research.
For someone who works as a pracademic, and so benefits from understanding both the practice and theory of ombuds work, this book is a welcome addition to the literature. & packs a vast amount of information, opinion and comment into its 192 pages. & this book will be of interest to researchers, students and practitioners who work for or have an interest in ombuds. (Carolyn Hirst, Ombuds Reslcí