Restorative justice has been the dominant model of criminal justice through most of human history for all the world's peoples. A decisive move away from it came with the Norman Conquest. However, victim-offender reconciliation began in 1974, and in the 1990s the New Zealand idea of family group conferences has spread to Australia, Singapore, the United Kingdom, Ireland, South Africa, the United States, and Canada. Informal justice must concern restoring victims, offenders, and communities as a result of participation of a plurality of stakeholders if it is to be restorative justice. Therefore, victim-offender mediation, healing circles, family group conferences, restorative probation, reparation boards on the Vermont model, whole school antibullying programs, Chinese Bang Jiao programs, and exit conferences following Western business regulatory inspections can at times all be restorative justice. Sets of both optimistic propositions and pessimistic claims can be made about restorative justice by contemplating the global diversity of its practice. Examination of both the optimistic and the pessimistic propositions aids understanding of prospects for restorative justice. In addition, regulatory theory involving a responsive regulatory pyramid may be more useful for preventing crime in a normatively acceptable way than are existing criminal law jurisprudence and explanatory theory. Evidence-based reform must move toward a more productive checking of restorative justice by liberal legalism, and vice-versa. Approximately 400 references (Author abstract modified)