Current Spotlight: Mediation in the Courts

Ruth Wishart, a Scottish broadcast journalist and a patron of the Scottish Mediation Network, after her visit to Maryland, eloquently expressed the importance of Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) in our courts:

"Self evidently, there are areas where only the courts can usefully intervene, and that will always be the case. But, as the Maryland experience has underlined, there are huge trenches of human activity scarred by conflict where an adversarial route can only exacerbate the problem."

If instead, each party has a means of articulating their pain and their concern, and has that testimony heard and respected, a huge amount of impotent anger can be syphoned out. If a solution is hammered out on the basis of interpersonal negotiation, rather than on tablets of judicial stone, then neither party is likely to feel the sense of injured loss often engendered in a system only geared to winners and losers.