Book Review: La giustizia senza spada. Uno studio comparato su giustizia riparativa e mediazione.

This stimulating monograph offers a valuable original contribution to the debate on a fundamental topic in restorative justice: the need for positioning restorative justice paradigms (and mediation in particular) in the criminal justice systems, from both a theoretical and a practical perspective. 

Mannozzi draws on a question suggested by the title¹.  Is it possible for justice – traditionally represented as a blindfolded woman with a scale and a sword – to do without the sword?  The author asks whether it is possible to overcome the ‘authoritative model’ of conflict resolution by means of a restorative justice model and mediation.  The former model resorts to the ‘sword’ for punishing and separating, and ends controversies by cutting all the ties between the conflicting parties. 

The research for an answer to this question reflects deeply on the opportunity and the potential of reparation and mediation.  It involves an accurate analysis of the practicability – from a normative and an operative point of view – of restorative justice paradigms in the Italian legal system.  

Mannozzi in the first two parts of her book tries to find what she calls ‘a common ontology’ for restorative justice and tries to reach a general definition of mediation that suits all the different operative models.  She pursues and finally reaches these two aims through a ‘research path’ leading through the investigation of philosophical and anthropological foundations of restoration and mediation.  From there, it proceeds to an analysis of their rationale.  Then comes a wide-ranging comparative analysis of the different operational experiences of victim offender mediation both internationally (Canada, United States, New Zealand, Australia, Germany, Austria, Belgium) and in the national context (Italy’s juvenile justice system and the proceedings before the justice of the peace). 

The results of this detailed study offer the author the theoretical and empirical basis to elaborate a ‘general theory’ of mediation. Through that, it is possible to position mediation within the legal system and to clarify its relationship (in terms of structural autonomy) with the criminal justice system. Mannozzi comes to the conclusion that mediation represents a fundamental paradigm to deal with conflicts arising in a complex society. It is able to avoid the rigidity and severity of criminal law. Meanwhile, it offers a valid instrument for social pacification, and gives the parties (and the victim in particular) a central role in the handling of their conflict.  

In other words, mediation represents the latest ‘evolutionary stage’ of our legal culture, as a model of justice which can do without judgement.  It promotes an act of responsibility which does not derive from an external coercion but from a dialectic path of knowledge, and tends to re-establish the law by the reactivation of the ‘normativeness of human relationships’.

November 2004