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Freeing The Parties From The Law: Designing An Interest And Rights Focused Model Of Landlord/Tenant Mediation, Joel Kurtzberg, Jamie Henikoff

Journal of Dispute Resolution

In this article, we point out two fundamental flaws of the critique. First, the critique compares mediation to an idealized view of adjudication instead of comparing mediation to its real-life alternatives. Second, it takes a narrow view of the role of law in mediation, erroneously assuming that mediators must either ignore the law or impose it on the parties. Part I of this article spells out the critics' claim that mediation generally harms the poor and disempowered by failing to adequately incorporate formal legal protections into the process. Part II examines the critique as it is applied to the landlord-tenant …