The Rise of ADR in Cultural Context
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Description
Another puzzling and controversial shift in American dispute processing was the turn away from the formal courtroom adjudication described in chapter 4, and towards Alternative Dispute Resolution. ADR took off later in the twentieth century than the expansion of discretion described in the last chapter and was responsive to societal currents that only partially overlapped those described there. Was it the result of a “crisis” in the courts? If so, what were its ingredients? I will argue that quite apart from a perceived litigation crisis, the move to ADR in the late twentieth century had institutional, political, and cultural causes. More specifically,it was dependent on the sometimes conflicting late-twentieth-century value shifts involving distrust of government, privatization, humanization of large-scale institutions, social progress through individual improvement, and postmodern skepticism about an objective reality. These themes echo the broader categories discussed in chapter 4 and identified there as fundamental to American culture: liberty, individualism, populism, egalitarianism, and laissez-faire. Developments in these cultural currents were reflected in — or exploited by — political and institutional actors.
Source Publication
Law, Culture, and Ritual: Disputing Systems in Cross-Cultural Context
Publication Date
2005
Recommended Citation
Chase, Oscar G., "The Rise of ADR in Cultural Context" (2005). Faculty Chapters. 1135.
https://gretchen.law.nyu.edu/fac-chapt/1135
