Law Commons^™

Trial And Error: Legislating Adr For Medical Malpractice Reform, Lydia Nussbaum

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The U.S. healthcare system has a problem: hundreds of thousands of people die each year, and over a million are injured, by medical mistakes that could have been avoided. Furthermore, over ninety percent of these patients and their families never learn of the errors or receive redress. This problem persists, despite myriad reforms to the medical malpractice system, because of lawmakers' dominant focus on reducing providers' liability insurance costs. Reform objectives are beginning to change, however, and the vehicle for implementing these changes is alternative dispute resolution ("ADR"). Historically, legislatures deployed ADR to curb malpractice litigation and restrict patients' access …

Decriminalizing Violence: A Critique Of Restorative Justice And Proposal For Diversionary Mediation, M. Eve Hanan

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In this article, Professor Hanan explores the issues surrounding reforms to the criminal justice system, juveniles, and conflict resolution. She asserts that enthusiasm for restorative justice as the best method of out-of-court dispute resolution in criminal cases should be tempered in favor of mediation, which is neutral because it does not assume that the accused is guilty and that "healing" or repair is warranted. Because decriminalization is not complete and the state retains jurisdiction, Professor Hanan argues for a neutral mediation program, which should (1) function to reduce overall contact with the criminal courts and (2) include procedural safeguards in …

Lawyerless Dispute Resolution: Rethinking A Paradigm, Jean R. Sternlight

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Do participants in mediation and arbitration have attorneys? Do they need them? Although the phenomenon of pro se litigation has received substantial attention in recent years, few commentators or policymakers have focused on these questions. The failure to focus on the possible need for representation in mediation and arbitration is based on an often unstated premise that because ADR processes are purportedly non-adversarial or less adversarial than litigation, disputants need representation less in ADR than they do in litigation. This Article suggests that the failure to focus on the possible need for representation in mediation and arbitration is fundamentally misguided. …

Resolving Civilian-Police Complaints In New York City: Reflections On Mediation In The Real World, Raymond W. Patterson

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The Civilian Complaint Review Board mediation program associated with the New York City Police Department appears to be an attractive alternative to the investigative process offered to complainants, offering the possibility of a higher level of satisfaction for both the civilian and the police officer. According to the scheme devised by the agency and the NYPD, cases that meet mediation guidelines should move smoothly from investigations through the approval process, coming to a scheduled mediation in a timely manner. Complaints containing some factor making them inappropriate for mediation should be able to be identified during that approval process, thus ensuring …

Forgetfulness, Fuzziness, Functionality, Fairness And Freedom, In Dispute Resolution, Jeffrey W. Stempel

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Professor Subrin is a self-professed traditionalist who has been one of the most forceful defenders of what I might term neo-traditional “Clarkian” litigation. By that, I mean the model of civil disputing in which litigation is a primary vehicle. More important, the litigation is based on notice pleading, broad discovery, and a preference for adjudication on the merits.

Key Subrin works over the years have focused on the historical path of the Clarkian model, which served to fuel much of the law revolution of the mid-Twentieth Century, to the “new era” of civil procedure and dispute resolution that dominated the …

Ulysses Tied To The Generic Whipping Post: The Continuing Odyssey Of Discovery "Reform", Jeffrey W. Stempel

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One need not be a charter member of the Critical Legal Studies Movement (“CLS”) to see a few fundamental contradictions in litigation practice in the United States. A prominent philosophical tenet of the CLS movement is that law and society are gripped by a “fundamental contradiction” and simultaneously seek to embrace contradictory objectives. Civil litigation, particularly discovery, is no exception: New amendments to the discovery rules are the latest example of this contradiction. Although the new changes are not drastic, they continue the post-1976 pattern of making discovery the convenient scapegoat for generalized complaints about the dispute resolution system. One …

Identifying Real Dichotomies Underlying The False Dichotomy: Twenty-First Century Mediation In An Eclectic Regime, Jeffrey W. Stempel

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Some people (lawyers, scholars, judges, dispute resolvers, policymakers) are more concerned about fidelity to procedural protocols while others are more concerned with the substantive rules governing disputes and substantive outcomes. Those in the dispute resolution community preferring facilitation tend to be proceduralists. For them, the observance of proper procedure is a high goal, perhaps the dominant goal. They reason, often implicitly, that adherence to the rules of procedure is the essence of neutrality, fairness, and the proper role of a dispute resolving apparatus. At some level, usually subconscious, there is a post-modern philosophical aspect of this preference. Because humans cannot …

The Inevitability Of The Eclectic: Liberating Adr From Ideology, Jeffrey W. Stempel

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The problem with viewing facilitation as the only legitimate form of mediation, of course, is that it borders on tautology: mediation is nonevaluative, therefore any evaluation in mediation must be impermissible. Although this view remains strongly held in many quarters, it appears to be in retreat, both within the mediation community and in the legal community at large. Courts and commentators have shown increasing favor toward some evaluative or advising component of mediation. More important, the eclectic style appears to be what takes place in the metaphorical trenches of mediation practice (although sound empirical data is necessarily hard to obtain …

Is Binding Arbitration A Form Of Adr?: An Argument That The Term "Adr" Has Begun To Outlive Its Usefulness, Jean R. Sternlight

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Professor Frank Sander has, for many years, been one of the most prescient commentators on the alternative dispute resolution ("ADR") movement. His 1976 Pound Conference speech has been identified by many as marking the birth of the modern ADR phenomena. That speech, which compared some of the pros and cons of litigation and an array of other dispute resolution processes, has been summarized as proposing the concept of the "multi-door courthouse." In contrast, Professor Sander's more recent and very interesting review of the present and future of ADR makes little attempt to distinguish between mediation and binding arbitration, the two …

Lawyers' Representation Of Clients In Mediation: Using Economics And Psychology To Structure Advocacy In A Non-Adversarial Setting, Jean R. Sternlight

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Many believe that lawyers' adversarial methods and mindsets are inherently inconsistent with mediation. Lawyers' emphasis on advocacy and winning is seen as ill-suited to mediation's nonadversarial, problem-solving approach to dispute resolution. Yet, as mediation grows increasingly common, lawyers are frequently accompanying their clients to mediation and often play a critical and direct part in the process. Particularly where disputes are complex or involve relatively large sums of money, it is likely that one or both disputants will be represented by an attorney at the mediation. This Article argues that attorneys need not and ought not to abandon their advocacy or …

Beyond Formalism And False Dichotomies: The Need For Institutionalizing A Flexible Concept Of The Mediator's Role, Jeffrey W. Stempel

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Related to the problem of the false dichotomy is the formalist application of the either/or construct. If, for example, one adopts as a first premise the view that mediation is by definition non-evaluative, and then rigidly applies this premise to issues of appropriate mediator behavior, the result is a formalist system that permits mediators little or no leeway to depart from the non-evaluative style. This sort of regulatory regimen may satisfy the non-evaluative ethos of some mediation scholars, but it does so at the risk of becoming a rigid system that prevents mediators from taking practical actions most appropriate to …