Implications for Criminal Justice Policy

Abstract

The modern criminal trial does significantly more than sit in judgement of the normative theory of the trial. It provides the basis for understanding, evaluating and integrating criminal justice policy, agents of justice, and the community more generally, into criminal justice policy. The conceptualisation of the trial as discursive advances our understanding of the criminal trial by acknowledging that the trial is shaped by social values, as an institution of social power. The criminal trial, as a significant institution of criminal justice policy, may be constituted around legitimating principles of the fair trial. These principles, however, are neither exclusive nor isolated but constituted through a process of discursive formation and archive. This provides for the dynamic basis of the institution of the criminal trial in society, and indicates why it continues as an institution of significant social power over time.