Among others of a number of reform movements of the past 25 years, restorative justice grew out of the informal justice movement, the victim rights movement and the restitution/diversion movement (designed to alleviate the burden put on the judicial system by increasingly incarcerative responses to crime). As its antecedents did, restorative justice has raised several legal issues related to its implementation as a system of criminal justice. Among these are jurisprudential concerns, victims' and offenders' rights, and procedural issues. More specifically, in this section:

• due process deals with the procedural protections traditionally accorded offenders, and the extent to which restorative processes provide those protections--
  

• e qual protection/discrimination describes the potential for the restorative justice system to even-handedly administer justice without regard to race, gender, religion, national origin, social standing, etc., and raises as a concern the inequities that could exist based on these and other factors;
• victims' rights discusses the assertion (and its equal protection implications) that victims are interested parties who should have standing and should be granted rights accordingly; and
• proportionality examines the goal for the traditional system in which similar offenses result in similar outcomes to satisfy a sense of fairness, and the notions of fairness within a restorative system which are based on consensus of agreement given a range of alternatives--e.g., participant satisfaction.