Mediation has long been used as a method of resolving disputes. Indeed, the practice of combining mediation and arbitration by the same neutral has been traced back to ancient Greece and Ptolemaic Egypt[1]. In his paper “Varieties of Dispute Processing”, presented to the 1976 Pound Conference, Harvard Professor Frank E.A. Sander proposed that, instead of…

As mentioned in my last blog , the UK Civil Justice Council, in its June 2021 Report on  Compulsory ADR , endorsed the idea, contrary to the ruling in the notorious Halsey case, that unwilling parties in dispute may lawfully and appropriately be compelled to participate in a DR process such as mediation. (As an…

Shows forms of dispute resolution and the thick line between mediation and arbitration

Law students are probably familiar with a diagram like the one above. It arranges different ways of resolving disputes according to how much say parties have in the outcome. Much as Felstiner and colleagues (1) famously described disputes being transformed into court cases through ‘naming, blaming and claiming,’ this graphic illustrates a parallel transformation in…

Less than you might think, according to Sir Geoffrey Vos, the newly-appointed Master of the Rolls. The Master of the Rolls is responsible for the administration of civil justice in England & Wales. Sir Geoffrey was sworn in to this post in January 2021. He has spoken several times since then about his vision for…

Graffiti commenting on truth and its usefulness today

I started mediating in my early 30s, surely old enough to know the difference between truth and fiction. Yet after a couple of years I began to say, first to myself then to my friends, that the concept of truth was ‘no longer useful’ in my work. What did I mean and how did I…

I write this in the aftermath of yet another mediation in which the protagonists exhibited symptoms of having been seriously traumatised by the litigation process to which they had been exposed. Depression, suicidal thoughts, anger, loathing, destroyed relationships, large amounts of money spent with no discernible value. And this was a commercial situation, not a…

The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the administration of justice has led to commendable judicial innovation, such as the use of virtual hearings, while much of the workload has been postponed until the resumption of face to face hearings is declared safe. In a message to judges in the UK Civil and Family Courts…

Is this yet another case in which New York is setting global trends? By the end of the year, the state courts in New York are due to have a system in place requiring that civil and commercial disputes be resolved through presumptive mediation. “Presumptive mediation” means an “automatic”, pre-trial, statewide program of court-sponsored ADR….

To paraphrase a worldwide cliché, you wait decades for a Mediation Act and two come along at once. On this typically dreich Scottish summer afternoon I find myself in the surprising position of examining two distinct proposals for mediation legislation. Why surprising? This blog has carried news of a succession of mediation acts in countries…