While dust settles on the passing of the Mediation Act, 2023 (“Mediation Act”), many have already written about the different dimensions of mediation under it. India’s mediation regime is unique for not only promoting indigenous modes of mediation, but also for championing mandatory statutory mediation. This includes the obligation to mandatorily utilise the pre-institution mediation…
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…
In a previous blog in 2018 , I commented on how Australian courts have approached their statutory power to order parties into mediation with or without their consent. In the recent case of Aversa v Transport for New South Wales (No 2) the judge had to decide whether to order mediation in a case involving…
In the beginning … Back in the 1976 Pound Conference called “Proceedings of the National Conference on the Causes of Popular Dissatisfaction with the Administration of Justice”, Harvard…
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…
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…
On July 12, 2021 the UK Civil Justice Council published its Report on Compulsory ADR . It considered first whether parties to a civil dispute in England and Wales may be compelled to participate in an ADR process. As to this question, it will be recalled that, in the Court of Appeal decision in Halsey…
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…
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…
The fairytale of mediation in Greece starts in 2008. Back then, a group of forward thinkers (or disillusioned persons, depending on the angle of the view) took the first class on mediation in Greece (organised by CIArb) and a little later, they received the CIArb accreditation. A few more persons of the same mindset took…
