Welcome! This is the definitive, full-text, curated collection of retired Judge Fred McElrea’s writings on restorative justice, or “rj” – together with a few writings by others which he refers to and some court cases where he or other judges applied restorative justice. You’ll see McElrea’s own 65-odd papers range from lectures at conferences in New Zealand, Australia, the UK, Europe, North and Central America and South Africa, through journal articles and academic book chapters, to news media articles, submissions to select committees, interviews and informal speech notes.

As Napier was a pilot city for restorative justice, our friends at Napier Library initiated the collection in the early 2000s. With their help we have been radically updating the collection in 2017, tripling the contents and creating brand new aids for readers and researchers, especially the Complete Overview and Synopsis Table, which should be your first port of call before launching into the Table of Key Themes and Best Paper(s) on Each and the papers themselves.

Most papers date from the period 1990 to 2013, during which McElrea was a judge of the New Zealand Youth Court and the District Court at Auckland, and an Alternate Environment Judge. However, most papers were not written in his capacity as judge. Mainly he wrote in a private, but well-informed, capacity as an advocate for restorative justice who was witnessing first-hand both it and the traditional “adversarial-punitive” alternative of courts and punishments.

 → Go back to the McElrea restorative justice home page