Court-Annexed Mediation: A Critical Perspective on Selected State and Federal Programs (Book Review)

If you need to know what is happening in court-annexed dispute resolution around the United States, there is no better resource available than this new book published by the Dispute Resolution Section of the American Bar Association in conjunction with Pike and Fischer, who are also the publishers of ADR Reports. Until tis book, most of the studies of court-annexed dispute resolution have either been formal evaluations of single programs undertaken by the court system in which the program is located or paper studies, which have reported on the published rules and intentions of the programs rather than what is occuring on the ground. With Court-Annexed Mediation, we are offered, for the most part, a substantially more realistic cross-sectional view of what is actually happening in the courts.

After some brief introductory materials, the bulk of the book is made up of nine chapters, each, written by an experienced dispute resolver, describing in fair detail the nature of one court-based dispute resolution system. While several of the authors are, or have been, directly involved with the operation of the system described, most of them are independent dispute resolvers who work with, but are not directly responsible for, the systems that they present. Thus, the authors are able to be reasonably objective about the strengths and weaknesses of the programs, and their knowledge about dispute resolution systems is broadly enough based to recognize the features of the system they describe which are unique, whether effective or ineffective. Each author provides an overview of the dispute resolution processes used in the system in question, some sense of the effectiveness of the system, and comments on problems and opportunities that the system has faced and enjoyed. In addition, basic constituting documents, such as court rules and the like, are provided for each of the programs discussed.

The selection of programs to be considered hits most of the high points of court-annexed dispute resolution in the United States. Statewide programs in Florida, Texas, and Minnesota as well as the District of Columbia's Multi-Door program, clearly represent the strongest uniform state programs in the country. It might have been interesting, for comparison, to have looked at a diverse system like California or New York, but a report on such a system would have been far more difficult to prepare. Other programs included are the Federal Court programs in the District of Columbia and New Jersey (Mediation), the Michigan State and Federal Courts programs (Michigan Mediation which is really a form of early evaluation/non-binding arbitration often combined with mediation), and the Northern District of Oklahoma (settlement judge) and Western District of Missouri (early assessment) programs. Between them, the provide a wide ranging picture of many of the options available to the courts, and the appended documents will provide guidance for other court systems considering implementing similar programs.

Ed Bergman and John Bickerman have done an excellent job of editing the materials that they received from the individual authors. The chapters are generally consistent in structure and format without losing the individual tone of each author's presentation.

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