Varieties of Dispute Processing: The Implications on Legal Education

Sander’s prophetic remarks in Varieties of Dispute Processing, along with the work of the other forefathers and foremothers of our field, have shaped dispute resolution reality worldwide on many levels: it has shaped policymaking in the sense that many dispute resolution mechanisms found their way into justice administration, civil and criminal, around the globe; it has brought to the attention of legal education institutions the need to enrich the legal curriculum with knowledge and skills required to function in the newly shaped administration of justice; it equipped the toolbox of legal professionals with much more diverse tools to assist clients; and it shifted the discourse in society about judicial satisfaction from “winning” to “getting what I needed.”...

Varieties of Dispute Processing

This article explores various dispute resolution mechanisms, assessing how they can be utilized so that one can develop some rational criteria for allocating various types of disputes to different dispute resolution processes. With the development of administrative law, the delegation of certain problems to specialized bodies for initial resolution has become a commonplace. Within the judicial sphere, too, specialized courts have been developed to handle family problems and tax problems, among others. While the mediation-arbitration model is useful, another device that bears further utilization is the screening-adjudication model. Ultimately, the article advocates for a flexible and diverse panoply of dispute resolution processes, with particular types of cases being assigned to differing processes, according to some of the criteria.

CommentsHow Useful Is Court ADR If Litigants (Still) Don’t Know about It?

In his landmark paper, Varieties of Dispute Processing, Frank Sander articulated the need to develop mechanisms to reduce the nation’s judicial caseload. Decades after delivering his essay at the 1976 Pound Conference, Sander’s ideas remain at the core of the dialogue about court-sponsored alternative dispute resolution (ADR). Sander asserted that, unless the courts developed additional procedures for resolving disputes, the continued growth of litigation could ultimately undermine the US judicial system’s ability to help constituents resolve conflicts in a timely and equitable fashion. Accordingly, he prescribed his now-famous framework for modern-day ADR within the court system—later coined the “multi-door courthouse”—which fueled the idea that courts should offer a range of options for addressing disputes....

Dispute Processing beyond the Courts: New Complexity, Old Problems

Nearly four decades after Frank E.A. Sander addressed the Pound Conference, his conception of the role alternative dispute resolution (ADR) can and should play in the American legal system remains profoundly influential. Sander’s remarks focused on alleviating overburdened courts and questioning the fundamental assumption that judges hold a monopoly on resolving disputes. He developed a matrix that crossed dispute characteristics—the nature of a dispute, the relationship between disputants, the amount in dispute, litigation costs, and need for speedy resolution—with different methods of dispute resolution, ranging from courtroom litigation to less formal alternatives such as mediation and negotiation. Sander envisioned a court of the future that considered carefully the interplay of dispute characteristics in order to match dispute types with methods of dispute resolution. By “fitting the forum to the fuss,” courts could lighten judges’ dockets, better serve disputants, and improve the delivery of justice. This idea, that courts could facilitate dispute resolution without judges, was revolutionary....

A Community of Judges

Kalindi Kokal, State Law, Dispute Processing, and Legal Pluralism: Unspoken Dialogues from Rural India (London and New York: Routledge, 2019), xi + 191 pp.

Homeless Applicants with Dissatisfactory Decisions, Appropriate Dispute Processing and Access to Justice

This short article examines the situation of the homeless applicant in relation to unsatisfactory decisions when attempting to secure temporary accommodation from local government in England. The issues of appropriate dispute processing, or methods of redress, and whether in practice legal and other remedies are available to applicants, should be analysed in the context of power imbalance in the applicant and local government officer relationship. Additionally, the applicant’s vulnerability, which led to the request for assistance in the first place, would need to be considered. Given that applicants are more likely not to challenge unsatisfactory decisions, socio-legal tools could assist in acquiring an insight into why this might be the applicant’s default position.