Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2000

Abstract

When we think of the "founding" of the ADR movement (particularly, but not exclusively, in law), from when do we date it? Whom do we think of as our leaders? Many of us think of Frank Sander and the "multi-door courthouse" suggested by his famous paper, delivered at the Pound Conference on the Causes of Popular Dissatisfaction with the Administration of Justice in 1976. For others, the publication of Roger Fisher and William Ury's "Getting to Yes," signaled an interest in a changed paradigm for engaging in legal negotiations. Some may associate ADR's nascency with early practical efforts to institutionalize "warmer" methods of disputing. Calling on these methods, the civil rights movement, the consumer movement, and local empowerment efforts all attempted to increase community participation and involvement in issues that were linked to larger social concerns. Yet, as we date most of the modern "ADR movement" to the 1970s and 1980s, we may be failing to pay enough serious attention to earlier "intellectual" founders of ADR - those who provided the key ideas, concepts or organizing frameworks from which we have built our modern movement of theories, practices, policies, and institutions. In this essay, I hope to remind us of who went before, and which of their ideas helped generate our current understandings of our field. I also will examine which of these ideas, theories, and concepts continue robustly to influence our practices and which might need to be modified in light of current conditions.

Publication Citation

16 Ohio St. J. on Disp. Resol. 1-37 (2000).

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