Academic centers offer unique opportunities for law schools to advance restorative justice through a combination of teaching, research, and community-engaged practice. Centers serve as incubators to study and teach restorative justice and put theory into practice through law clinics and direct community service. As academic hubs, centers can facilitate an interactive dialogue or “unbroken circle” connecting restorative justice education, scholarship, and practice. Each aspect of the trifecta enhances the others: Restorative justice work in the community provides practical insights and informs research and teaching. In turn, scholarship and teaching sharpen and amplify community-based models. Teaching provides a platform to incorporate emerging scholarship and examples of restorative justice work. This article examines this dialogic relationship among restorative justice teaching, scholarship, and community practice through the lens of the evolution of the Center for Dispute Resolution at the University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law (C-DRUM) over two decades. C-DRUM started its restorative work as part of a conflict resolution education program in K-12 Maryland schools. That community-based restorative work grew and expanded into the law school curriculum, providing both traditional classroom and experiential opportunities for law students. Over time, the guiding principles of restorative justice—including the centering of relationships and community-based processes to promote accountability and repair harm—broadened C-DRUM’s mission and influenced the center’s other work.
In a moment when restorative justice stands poised to mainstream in U.S. and Canadian legal education, this essay recalls some intellectual history of ADR as a comparative tale. We argue that ADR’s eventual embrace of a single state legal system greatly facilitated its uptake as a field in legal education. By contrast, our research suggests that restorative justice teachers are more capaciously asking how people’s efforts to imaginatively reconfigure conflict practices can open plural pathways to legal experimentation and social change. To that end, we observe what we are calling two “pedagogies in the meantime” that characterize this experimental work: comparison and prefiguration. We conclude by briefly reflecting on what these pedagogies could mean for restorative justice as a field in legal education.
