“Justice,” like rights, is an elusive term.
Conflicting notions such as revenge and restoration are embodied in it. Justice can be substantive or symbolic. It can be politicized, performed, or transgressed. In the realm of criminal law, the pursuit of justice is of even greater importance than in civil or administrative law, because the very definitions of crime and punishment cannot be maintained without some basic notions of justice in society.
Yet criminal justice is not merely what Durkheim ([1895] 1984) calls “repressive law” - in Asia, as elsewhere, the expression and implementation of justice has gone far beyond the traditional repressive orientation to include many other elements of politics, culture, and legal institutions. The two selections in this section present two distinct ways to study the issue of justice. Sapio, Trevaskes, Biddulph, and Nesossi offer a political and performative approach to criminal justice in China. By contrast, Won Kyung Chang adopts a pragmatic and experimental approach to examine the introduction of the notion of restorative justice in Korean courts.8.4