Different methods, same results as French criminal courts try to meet contradictory policy demands

Virginie Gautron (1)

1 DCS - Droit et changement social

Structural and procedural reforms were hastened in an attempt to modernize the judicial system since the late 1990s, which gave “new public management” precepts greater influence. To explain how judges perceive and have appropriated this new managerial approach, as well as its impact on the administration of justice and on punishment (Gautron 2014a), this contribution goes beyond legal texts and ministerial recommendations, drawing on the results of collective, interdisciplinary, quantitative, and qualitative research into how the handling of misdemeanors has evolved during the 2000s in five French courts. Conducted by legal academics, sociologists, and psychosociologists, our study is based on a representative sample of 7,562 misdemeanor cases involving adult offenders, various direct observations and about sixty semi-directed interviews.

Mots clés: Criminal Justice; new public management

Domaines: Droit; Sociologie

Virginie Gautron. Different methods, same results as French criminal courts try to meet contradictory policy demands. Annie Hondeghem, Xavier Rousseaux, Fréderic Schoenaers. Modernisation of the criminal justice chain and the judicial system. New insights on trust, cooperation and human capital, 50, Springer, pp.37-50, 2016, Ius Gentium: Comparative Perspectives on Law and Justice, 978-3-319-25802-7. ⟨10.1007/978-3-319-25802-7_3⟩. ⟨halshs-01575838⟩