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This edited book summarizes and integrates the best criminological and criminal justice research currently being undertaken in the rapidly growing interdisciplinary field of legitimacy in criminal justice, seeking to better understand the conceptual­ization and the refinement of its various measures. Each contributor to this volume is a scholar who has conducted theory-based empirical research on legitimacy in the past. Although the major theme of each chapter is unique and constricting, there are some discussions that, unavoidably, overlap with other chapters. However, taken as a whole, the chapters are mutually informative, providing a forum where dialogues among the contributing authors are made possible.

Legitimacy, as a sensitizing concept in democracy, can be tested, improved, and refined. Despite no universal definition, legitimacy has played a significant role in policing, apparently from the formation of the London Metropolitan Police in 1829 to community policing today. Furthermore, in the new millennium, the study of legitimacy has found its way into the center of criminology and criminal justice (Farrington et al., 2022). This is partially due to the cumulative efforts of scholars, including the contributors in this edited volume, who have explored this issue across disciplines and across national boundaries. The collection of the essays serves as a striking testimony to the broad and heuristic value of legiti­macy, and it represents a convergence of interests in the topic and in its empiri­cal status.

The major theme of the book is not to replace police legitimacy vis-à-vis the procedural justice framework, but to enrich the construct by providing a more bal­anced understanding of it. Currently, the literature on procedural justice and police legitimacy tilts toward its positive function and tends to regard their use as a pana­cea. As such, one of the arguments of this book is that police legitimacy, just like procedural justice, is a double-edged sword. There is no doubt that it could produce many positive functions, but we should not forget that it can become dysfunctional when taken too far. Another theoretical weakness in the current research on legiti­macy research vis-a-vis procedural justice is that the economic and ethnic-racial structures have often been slighted. Empirical tests relying on survey data tend to avoid the structural variations and their impact on police legitimacy vis-à-vis proce­dural justice. Ultimately, the existence of legitimacy depends on the extent to which the public perceives law enforcement practices as reflecting its ethnic-racial and cultural identity and meeting its needs.

Taken together, the book’s chapters offer readers a better understanding of twenty-first century dynamics in the study of legitimacy. Given the quality of the contributions, the volume is a potential landmark in the internationally growing lit­erature of legitimacy in criminology and criminal justice. It is my wish that this book will galvanize new generations of scholars to explore questions of legitimacy deeper and more internationally. In addition to providing key overviews and theo­retical extensions, each chapter reviews and summarizes the major themes and find­ings of the groundbreaking work in this area and integrates this knowledge with that of the other contributors. Readers, it is hoped, will agree that this book captures well the burgeoning theoretical and empirical interests in the study of legitimacy. Additionally, if readers as well as the contributors use this book as supplementary reading for graduate courses, it may help to define the contours and salience of this topic for the next generation of scholars.