Based on work by Professor Tom Tyler of the Yale Law School, Procedural Justice (PJ) (sometimes also called Procedural Fairness) looks at how judgements about justice or injustice shapes the legitimacy of the courts and its systems. His book Why People Obey the Law states it is not fear of punishment that gets people to obey the law but, rather, whether they believe in its legitimacy. In fact, according to Dr. Martin Luther King, it is everyone’s duty to break unjust laws. Tyler has shown that even if a person loses a case, he or she will express satisfaction if they feel the procedure was fair – that they “had their day in court.” Practicing PJ, according to the PJ website, is “associated with higher levels of compliance with and greater amounts of satisfaction with decisions by authority figures.”

There is a PJ blog.