Law Commons^™

Court-Ordered Mediation In Family Disputes: The New York Proposal, Linda Silberman, Andrew Schepard

Hofstra Law Faculty Scholarship

Marital and family disputes have been an important focus for alternative dispute resolution. Perhaps because divorce and custody disputes reveal the personal, human, and emotional aspects of conflict more visibly than other types of legal proceedings, attempts to resolve such disputes through the traditional legal process have proved remarkably ineffective. Mediation of divorce and custody matters is a particularly promising method of achieving more expeditious, less hostile, and more enduring matrimonial and custodial arrangements.

The mediation process offers to divorcing couples a neutral third party who will help the parties resolve their disputes. The mediator's function is to develop a …

Ground Rules For Custody Mediation And Modification, Andrew Schepard, Melissa D. Philbrick, Dvora Wolff Rabino

Hofstra Law Faculty Scholarship

This Article describes an approach to resolving some of the strategic and ethical problems faced by attorneys who wish to mediate the custody disputes of divorcing parents. Part I of the Article sets forth some of the issues custody mediators necessarily confront and the setting in which we attempted to resolve them. Part II discusses the mediation ground rules that we developed to ensure that the mediation process would be both beneficial for the child and his family and ethical for attorneys working with mental health professionals. Because future disputes might develop and circumstances could change, Part III suggests a …