Civil mediation: a measured approach?

Abstract

The mediation movement in Britain over the last 15 years has been enormously successful in establishing a firm place in policy debates on the administration of civil and family justice. Arguably, it has taken the lead and framed the content of debate outside the criminal sphere. The mediation movement has challenged the purpose of the civil and family justice systems, the value of public courts, the relevance of judicial determination to modern disputes and the legal profession's commitment to representative advocacy. We have witnessed a revolution in dispute resolution discourse. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, political arguments, judicial speeches and policy pronouncements about how civil and family justice should be working now focus on how to encourage or force more people to mediate, on worrying about why more people aren't mediating, and on promoting the value of mediation to the justice system and society as a whole.1