The author proposes the ethical concept of "hospitality" as appropriate for restorative justice. Restorative justice aspires to a justice that is hospitable and meaningful to those involved in a harmful event. This concept contrasts with the inhospitality, even hostility, of the adversarial courtroom's version of criminal justice and its attempts to prove guilt against general laws. Hospitality, on the other hand, involves a welcoming of those before the threshold of the place where a host receives. This implies an ethics that "imagines and negotiates" various ways of being with others. If restorative justice welcomes in ways that are an alternative to criminal justice institutions, then it works under different auspices than the law-based, universalizing, retributive adversarial calculations of criminal justice. Many practices billed as restorative justice narrow the scope of subject formation by demanding that participants play the roles of "victim," "offender," and "family member" while focusing exclusively on a given "harm," "community transgression," or "crime." This form of welcome or hospitality limits ethics and the promise of justice because it requires subjects to appropriate "justice" through individual conciliation, healing, atonement, redemption, or repentance. By contrast, ethics as hospitality demands that justice not be calculated by presuming that subjects have predetermined natures and postures based in fixed communal patterns. The encounter between host (e.g., referees) and guests (victims, families, members of the community, and offender) could also create spaces for the negotiation of new ethical terrains for subjects, identities, and collective lives yet to be conceived. This image of restorative ethics endorses the concept that different circumstances, calculations of otherness, and hospitality can elicit diverse sorts of ethical subjects in search of justice. 15 notes