12 Connecting Philosophy and Practice JOHN BRAITHWAITE AND HEATHER STRANG It was Kurt Lewin who famously said there is nothing as practical as a good theory. This was a statement about the impact of explanatory theories on practice in the world. Philip Pettit and John Braithwaite in their contribution to this volume take Lewin a step further. They argue that normative theory is improved by being responsive to good explanatory theory and vice versa. There is nothing as practical as a good philosophy and the best philosophy is informed by practice. The history of restorative justice in the 1990s illuminates both claims. Restorative practices preceded their philosophical interpretation as restorative justice. Since Kant, Hegel and Bentham made their seminal contributions, the philosophy of punishment has been one of the dullest, least inspired fields within both philosophy and criminology, even though it has attracted contributions from many of law and philosophy's brightest and best - Rawls, Dworkin, Hart, Habermas, Nozick, among others. Restorative justice practice has inspired some creative new thinking, as evidenced in this volume. Yet the volume also indicates that it is early days; philosophy is still lagging behind practice. This is clear in the way the New Zealand courts struggled with the Clotworthy case as discussed by Sir Anthony Mason in his opening contribution, and taken up by Morris and Young and Barton in their essays. At the time of writing even greater judicial ferment surrounds the decision of the Canadian Supreme Court in Gladue to recognise restorative justice as a more important principle of criminal sentencing for First Nations defendants than for defendants from the rest of the community. Equally, the volume demonstrates a crying need for practice to be more informed by philosophy. Consider, for example, Christine Alder's warnings about the dangers restorative justice practices might pose to young women - shame as a threat to self-esteem, family members who have sexually abused them haviug a say in how their offending will be dealt with, community controls that seek to dominate young women into conventional moulds of femininity, and more. 203