Enhancing Justice: Reducing Bias was written by an exceptional and diverse team of authors, all with expertise relevant to understanding and improving implicit biases. Judges, lawyers, social scientists, professors, and experienced trainers worked together to bring cutting-edge research and thinking to this effort. The result offers both perspective and practical advice from their disciplines and their collaboration. While not all the authors would agree on each possible approach, the focus is on best practices, as we know them today, which can enable courts to lessen the impact of implicit bias. The book seeks to help “break the bias habit” by increasing knowledge and awareness of implicit bias, improved understanding and practice of procedural fairness and of culturally competent communication across cultures, and a sustained commitment to mindfulness.
If we are to ever eradicate the "color-line," that W. E. B. DuBois spoke of over 100 years ago, each of us must be mindful; each of us must cast a critical eye inward and examine our attitudes far more carefully than will be comfortable. Enhancing Justice: Reducing Bias provides an excellent starting point for explaining the need for this introspection as well as for developing strategies and mechanisms that will hopefully, one day, allow each of us to “stop discriminating” so that we can more honestly and intelligently move toward a judicial system that is truly based on impartiality and fairness and is recognized as such.
