Battered Women's Movement Ideals and Judge-Led Social Change in Domestic Violence Courts

Abstract

The 1990s brought a new nation-wide movement towards special courts, now also called problem-solving courts (Berman and Feinblatt 2001; Goldkamp 2002), including drug courts, community courts, mental health courts and domestic violence courts. Contemporary specialized courts have had some success in making the professional domain of criminal justice more porous to the public sphere, to problems experienced by lay citizens in the public sphere, and to social movements organized around these social problems. The idea is that specialized courts should seek to implement a vision of social change by addressing the root causes of the social problems identified by the public, like drug abuse and domestic violence, within the individual, the society and the larger culture. New judicial goals include social outcomes: tangible community results like safer streets and stronger families. And the public continues to stay involved by participating directly in the legal process as these new judges bring citizens in to participate in advisory boards and to organize community service projects for offenders. Specialized courts are thus a breakthrough from a traditional process-and-punish orientation to one based on the idea that the social problems identified by the public are the responsibility of the courts. The result is courts with growing democratic responsiveness.