This editorial offers an introduction to the current issue.

The distance between the public and the judiciary takes two forms: a punitivity gap and an accessibility gap. This article discusses both types of gap and elaborates on the issue of whether the existence of these gaps influences confidence in the judiciary. From the literature, it appears that the public is generally of the opinion that courts sentence too leniently. However, experiments show that when citizens receive information on a specific case, they become less punitive. Information provision may also help to bridge an accessibility gap, as does actual citizen involvement in the administration of justice. The relation between the gaps discussed and confidence in the judiciary is not clear as yet. The article discusses methods generally used to assess confidence and suggests that confidence may be increased by a reduction of the two gaps.

Transparency of institutions like the judiciary is often assumed to increase confidence. However, a recent survey concerning opinions about the judiciary showed that in many cases one trusts the judiciary without having any special interest in the judiciary itself. It revealed that confidence in the judiciary depends on various factors like anomy, social trust, general institutional trust, personal experience and feelings about a fair chance in a hypothetical case for court. And transparency will not easily change these factors. Furthermore, providing information can both strengthen and weaken confidence due to the personal backgrounds of those receiving the information. Finally, this paper discusses whether strategic and positive information that is needed to increase confidence allows for drawing one’s own conclusions as transparency promises.

In this contribution it has been set out that trust in the Belgian justice system cannot be taken for granted. The article contains empirical research on the reporting of newspapers on the Belgian justice system and tries to uncover a possible causal relationship between reading certain newspapers and trust in the justice system. Although it turns out that quality newspapers report on the justice system in a more negative way, readers of popular papers have less trust in the justice system. A direct link between negative reporting and reduced trust was therefore not found. Socio-economic variables and the priming effect on punitive attitudes in popular newspapers are cited as possible explanations.

The degree to which individuals have confidence in the judiciary varies substantially. In this paper, we take the heterogeneity of the population as a starting-point. Our basic idea is that signals about the judiciary acquire significance through frames, schemes of interpretation. Using focus groups we portrayed contrasting frames of citizens. These frames enable us to test the consequences of measures to promote confidence. Measures that tend to increase confidence according to one frame may decrease confidence according to another. This yields dilemmas for those looking for possibilities to promote confidence. One possibility to deal with these dilemmas is to differentiate between different audiences.

It is important for the Dutch judiciary to monitor how society, professional partners and litigants perceive the administration of justice. Different polls and studies provide this information. However, up until 2012 little was known about the way top-level (public and private) decision makers and opinion leaders view the functioning of the courts. This prompted the Council for the Judiciary to commission a study on the external reputation of the administration of justice. The results of this study show that there is neither reason for serious concern nor reason for complacency. Criticism was voiced with regard to the operational capacity of the courts, most notably the case processing time and the lack of technical innovation. Also, it was concluded that the judiciary should take a more proactive stance concerning external communication.A couple of months after the study on the external reputation of the courts was completed, some justices of the Court of Appeal Leeuwarden conceived the so-called ‘Manifest’. Among other things, they criticized the caseload, which in their view threatens the independence of judges. Approximately 700 judges supported the Manifest. So lack of internal support rather than lack of external support seemed to pose a problem for the judiciary. What should the judiciary’s course of action be? Whereas the reputation study points to increasing the operational capacity of the courts, the supporters of the Manifest warn that too strong a focus on output would endanger the quality of justice. These contradictory factors demand reflection on the value identity of the judiciary. In our view this requires the Council for the Judiciary to focus less on management and more on governance. For judges this requires that they, through the development of professional standards, define and refine their view on ‘good administration of justice’.

For many years, most regulatory research focused on instrumental motivations for compliance, which emphasize the role of rewards and punishments related to (dis)obeying the law. However, more recent studies have also emphasized the potential role of normative motivations. Using survey data collected from a sample of 1,182 traffic offenders in the Netherlands, and building on the ‘procedural justice model’ which was first developed in Why People Obey the Law (Tyler 1990), this paper explores how perceptions of legitimacy shape regulatory compliance. The study makes three contributions to the literature. First, this study is one of the few studies in which the procedural justice model is tested in Continental Europe. Second, following recent critiques in the literature, the paper introduces three modifications to the original model. Third, and unlike most previous studies, this study is not entirely based on self-reporting by drivers, but includes actual evidence about their behavior as well. With regard to the self-reported level of compliance, our study largely confirms Tyler’s (1990) original findings. Yet with regard to the observed level of compliance, there are also important differences between both studies. These findings will be explained by shifting our focus of attention from Tyler’s ‘universalistic’ approach to ‘legitimacy-in-context’ (Beetham 1991).