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Purpose – This chapter considers the consequences on liberty in relationship to the development of the international problem-solving court movement.

Design/methodology/approach – The research, which relies principally on ethnographic fieldwork in six different common law countries (England, Ireland, Scotland, Australia, Canada, and the United States), explores the development of local problem-solving courts in each jurisdiction. These include drug courts, community courts, domestic violence courts, and mental health courts. The ethnographic fieldwork was supplemented with data from various other sources, including government reports, parliamentary debates, evaluations of individual court programs, publications issued by various advocacy groups, media accounts, public statements and articles by problem-solving court judges, and analyses of specialty courts in law reviews and other academic journals.

Findings – The research reveal that the five countries outside of the United States demonstrate greater concern with protecting the dignity of the court, due process, and individual rights – or what the Australians refer to as open and natural justice.

Originality/value – It is the first large-scale comparative study of problem-solving courts in the common law countries where the movement is most advanced.

At first glance, it might seem from the statistics that 18- to 20-year-old members of minority ethnic groups are doing relatively well in terms of higher education. They are in fact better represented in UK colleges and universities than young whites. However, this is far from the whole story. Certain black groups, such as African–Caribbean males and Bangladeshi females, are significantly underrepresented in higher education in general and certain programmes in particular. For example, there has been difficulty recruiting Black and ethnic minority students into teacher training programmes (DfEE, 1998). The experience of participating in higher education is also often different for black and white students. Black and minority ethnic students are more likely to be concentrated in the new universities. In the mid-1990s, only 0.5 percent of the students at the older established universities came from a Black or minority ethnic background, compared with 14.4 percent in the new universities (DfEE, 1998). This inequality helps to perpetuate a system of white privilege, one that is entrenched in other areas of public life in the UK. Black and minority ethnic students are also more likely to study part-time than white students, are more likely to drop out of courses, and more frequently opt for lower-level qualifications (i.e., a diploma rather than a degree).

Institutions of higher education in Britain pride themselves on being open, liberal spaces of learning and social engagement. However, many establishments, particularly the prestigious ‘old’ universities, are predominantly White, despite the implementation of a range of progressive, anti-racist, multicultural policies and practices. This chapter draws on both national discourses and research conducted in a major civic university to argue that it is necessary to confront myths of academic liberalism, the ideology of professional academic autonomy and the historical and contemporary processes that continue to shape university racisms. The picture revealed is one of unsettling rather than transformative spaces, where there are contests over power, intellectual authority and ethnic identity, but where there is also cultural containment through hegemonic practices.

Hugh Africa returned to South Africa in July 1994 after an absence of 30 years. His deep involvement at all levels of education – from basic to university – covers almost four decades. After obtaining the B.A. and B.A. (Hons) degrees from the University of Natal, he completed the M.A. degree at the University of Leeds and received his Ph.D. at the University of Toronto. He also holds a Natal Teacher's Diploma.

Walter R. Allen is Allan Murray Cartter Professor in Higher Education, Graduate School of Education and Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is also distinguished professor of sociology and director of CHOICES, a longitudinal study of college attendance among African Americans and Latinos in California. Allen's research interests include higher education, race and ethnicity, family patterns, and social inequality. He has been a consultant to courts, communities, business, and government. Allen's more than 100 publications include: Towards a Brighter Tomorrow: College Barriers, Hopes and Plans of Black, Latino/a and Asian American Students in California (2009); Till Victory is Won: The African American Struggle for Higher Education in California (2009); Everyday Discrimination in a National Sample of Incoming Law Students (2008); Higher Education in a Global Society: Achieving Diversity, Equity and Excellence (2006); Enacting Diverse Learning Environments: Improving the Climate for Racial/Ethnic Diversity in Higher Education (1999); College in Black and White: African American Students in Predominantly White and Historically Black Public Universities (1991); and The Colorline and the Quality of Life in America (1989).

W.E.B. Du Bois proclaimed the colorline as the problem of the 20th century; in similar fashion, the problem of the 21st century could be characterized as the “wealth divide” or more clearly, the challenge of extreme economic disparity alongside broad socio-cultural diversity. Women-of-color scholars have used various concepts such as “the matrix of domination” (King, 1988), “intersectionality” (Collins, 1991), “borderlands” (Anzaldúa, 1987) and critical race theory (Crenshaw, 1995) to demonstrate that the “problems of the 21st century” are related to rapidly expanding diversity alongside stubbornly persistent economic inequities across race, ethnicity, gender, class, language, citizenship and nation. Extensive technological, economic, political and social changes, along with immigration, have coalesced to produce a global community of great diversity and interpenetration. Unfortunately, this global community continues to be fractured by extreme disparities in wealth, divided into “have” and “have-not” societies (Chua, 2003).

The current state of globalization is aggravating the inequalities within globalized cities and is generating a high degree of conflict. If we seek to find out to what extent ghettos, agents in conflict or if there is a situation of unsustainable imbalance caused by this degree of inequality, we should consider the objective data and the social consciousness of stratification enclosed in social interaction of the people living in neighborhoods in global cities. This chapter explains how we can study this topic with an example: a town in the Metropolitan Area of Madrid in 2012, with a theoretical perspective that asks about how the human space is today and how everybody builds his social identification, and a methodology that uses the problem-centered interview to collect data. From this perspective, it is discussed whether the new urban social structure tends to be dual or fragmented. When social awareness is studied, it may be understood that urban people tend to develop fragmented identities today based on leisure and family that bond everyone with other by small groups or weak bonds. However, into a poor urban area, there are other boundaries that a lot of people recognize based on class and ethnic differences that mean polarization and conflict, but these ones work only in particular problematic situations. So, the image of system of stratification in large cities appears to be a dynamic thing, under the influence of a series of different factors which are not only global but also local.

If what sociologists call “social structures” are understood to be recurrent patterns of joint action, then the charge that interactionism suffers from an astructural bias falls apart, because such patterns of joint action are what interactionists routinely study. The problem, then, is not that interactionism fails to grasp structure, but that much of the mainstream of sociology fails to grasp process. It is this aprocessual bias that impedes a full understanding of how inequality is created and reproduced. The case of capitalism is used to show how an interactionist focus on process can illuminate the workings of a large-scale economic system. I treat capitalism as a macro interaction order, à la Goffman, and then employ the tools of dramaturgical sociology to analyze the recurrent patterns of joint action of which capitalism consists. This form of dramaturgical analysis is applied to two fictional stories as a way to show how capitalism depends on normative and procedural rules, cognitive presuppositions, and ritual forms – all of which are typically rendered invisible by aprocessual bias. The concepts of side bets, identity stakes, and nets of accountability are developed to complete the analysis.