ABSTRACT

The procedural structure and personal intimacy of restorative justice, it is claimed, allow us to conceive in new and more promising ways the relation not necessarily between love itself and justice, but between compassion or fellow-feeling and justice. The adversarial system of adjudication has certain structural barriers to giving compassion a prominent role in the struggle for just resolution to conflict. Restorative justice hopes to clear away these barriers and make way for closer interconnections between fellow-feeling and justice.