Dr. Lode Walgrave directs the Research Group on Youth Criminology at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Belgium). He also teaches in the field of youth crime and juvenile justice.

Over the last decade, Dr. Walgrave has increasingly engaged with the restorative justice movement. Originally he saw restorative justice as a third way whose practices might counter two conditions attendant to the established practices in the juvenile justice system - neglect of legal safeguards and inefficiency. He believed these conditions would cause juvenile justice to slide down toward a predominantly punitive system.

Dr. Walgrave seeks to develop an adequate legal framework that would leave maximal space for informal processing, while providing a practical footing for safeguarding rights and freedoms. His approach to developing restorative justice practices is guided by sensitivity to legal issues, a characteristic of European continental researchers who work in a more centralized legalistic regime than the common law systems in the Anglo Saxon countries.

Dr. Walgrave is currently most involved in the quest for a normative theory of restorative justice. Basic questions include:
• Which socio-ethics guide the belief that restorative responses to crime are superior to punitive or even purely rehabilitative responses?
• How can we deduce from these socio-ethics legal principles to develop a fully fledged restorative justice system?

Leading Edge. Dr. Walgrave’s current research on restorative justice includes three sub topics.
• Develop a theory for a ‘maximalist’ restorative justice system that addresses situations in which voluntary agreements are not achieved.
• Empirical and theoretical research on the use of community service as seen in a restorative perspective.
• Scientific guidance and evaluation of an experiment with restorative conferencing in the Belgian juvenile justice system.

We gratefully acknowledge the assistance of the Prison Fellowship International Centre for Justice and Reconciliation, for the content of this biography which first appeared in the Leading Edge at http://www.restorativejustice.org. Any errors or omissions belong to the Centre for Restorative Justice.