ABSTRACT
Just as Christie, in his landmark essay “Conflicts as Property,” accused lawyers and court professionals of stealing our conflicts, professional politicians have stolen our decision making. Throughout the world, politicians pursue wealth and power by selling favourable decisions to the highest bidder. The remedy to rampant corruption may lie in filling our legislatures with randomly selected citizens – a process called sortition or election by lot – which has its origins in Athenian democracy. The critical question is whether groups of ordinary people can make good decisions, better than the professionals. This chapter aims to contribute to the Handbook’s ambitions by arguing that restorative practices such as family group conferences, restorative conferences and circle sentencing provide significant evidence that ordinary people can make good decisions in issues which affect them and their community of care. Using evidence from the extant literature combined with the author’s decades of restorative justice observations, the chapter argues that along with similar outcomes from business management research and deliberative democracy experiments, restorative practices can point to the potential of making governance more truly representative.
