Vermont Bar Journal, Vol. 40, No. 2 Summer 2014, Vol. 40, No. 2 | Page 21

www.vtbar.org ening democracy. It is also about strengthening communities, families, and schools, which have profound value in themselves, independent of the contributions they make to democracy or justice. We have a long way to go in learning how to evaluate more effectively how restorative justice can be improved so as to be more effective in strengthening individual people as human beings, as well as the families, schools, and communities that nourish their humanness. Methodological Challenges The evidence is convincing that restorative justice can be powerfully effective. At the same time, the evidence is thin that these strategies are consistently effective as regulatory strategies. It seems likely that this pattern will always prevail even as the empirical evidence becomes more illuminating about the limits and strengths of restorative justice. Why is this? First, it is a general strategy of regulation where regulation is conceived very broadly as “steering the flow of events.”28 By my theoretical lights, restorative justice is conceived as relevant to very micro behaviors such as bullying in schools and workplaces, to intra-family relationships, to intermediate forms of regulation such as the regulation of gangs that engage in crime, of small businesses paying tax or complying with environmental laws, up to the macro regulation of capitalism, its commanding heights, global financial crises and up to the regulation of international conflicts between states and the global war on terror. Reviews of the evidence for the effectiveness of general strategies of this kind can only be systematic if they are focused. So a review such as that of Weatherburn that counts studies that assess whether restorative justice reduces “crime” is no longer the most useful kind of work to do because we know that the effectiveness of restorative justice is weak at best with minor property crimes that account for most of the restorative justice in Weatherburn’s timid and conservative jurisdiction (New South Wales); equally, the evidence for restorative justice being effective with serious crime, particularly violent crime, is most encouraging.29 So we need reviews of the evidence for the effectiveness of restorative and responsive regulation on something as focused as small business tax compliance, as Valerie Braithwaite began to assem