Lode Walgrave directs the Research Group on Youth Criminology at  Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Belgium). He  also teaches in the field of youth crime and juvenile justice.

Over the last decade, Lode has increasingly engaged with the restorative justice movement.  Originally he saw restorative justice as a third way whose practices might counter two conditions attendant to the established practices in the juvenile justice system - neglect of legal safeguards and inefficiency. He believed these conditions would cause juvenile justice to slide down toward a predominantly punitive system.

Lode seeks to develop an adequate legal framework that would leave maximal space for informal processing, while providing a practical footing for safeguarding rights and freedoms. His approach to developing restorative justice practices is guided by a sensitivity to legal issues, a characteristic of European continental researchers who work in a more centralized legalistic regime than the common law systems in the Anglo Saxon countries.  

Lode is currently most involved in the quest for a normative theory of restorative justice.  Basic questions are:  

• Which socio-ethics guide the belief that restorative responses to crime are superior to punitive or even purely rehabilitative responses?  

• How can we deduce from these socio-ethics legal principles to develop a fully fledged restorative justice system?

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. . .to actualize its potential fully, a maximalist version of restorative justice must be developed with the aim of providing restorative outcomes

•  to a maximum number of crimes
• in a maximum number of possible situations and contexts.
  

This approach would include those where voluntary agreements are not possible and coercion is needed.

Restorative justice must predominantly remain a model in which predominantly voluntary settlements between victims, offenders and communities are based on free agreements between parties concerned.  But if it was limited to such processes, Restorative Justice would be condemned

to stay at the margins of the criminal justice system,

to leave the majority of offences to the very problematic punitive system,

to deny the victims of the most serious offences the benefits of restoration.


(Adapted from L. Walgrave, On Restoration and Punishment: Favourable Similarities and Fortunate Differences. IN G. Maxwell and A. Morris (eds.), Restorative Justice for Juveniles: Conferencing, Mediation and Circles, Oxford, Hart, 2001, 17-37, pp. 36-7.)

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Leading Edge.  Lode’s current research on restorative justice includes three sub topics.

• Develop a theory for a ‘maximalist’ restorative justice system that addresses situations in which voluntary agreements are not achieved.  

• Empirical and theoretical research on the use of community service as seen in a restorative perspective.

• Scientific guidance and evaluation of an experiment with restorative conferencing in the Belgian juvenile justice system.

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Reach Lode Walgrave at lode.walgrave@law.kuleuven.ac.be   

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