Alternative Dispute Resolution

Alternative dispute resolution, or as it is more commonly named now, appropriate dispute resolution, is the study and practice of the many ways legal disputes and transactions are handled, managed or resolved. ADR is both the oldest and some of the newest ways of resolving conflicts that have legal implications. As long as there have been people and communities, methods for resolving disputes have had to be developed, ranging from mediation by older and wiser community members to the highly technical rule systems of our own litigation in both civil and criminal contexts. In recent years, interest in ADR has grown from two, often competing, sets of policy choices--greater efficiency in our case processing (docket clearing and "quantitative" ADR) and greater party participation and influence over situation-specific and adaptive solutions to conflict ("qualitative" ADR). ADR has come to mean almost any form of dispute resolution outside of full adjudication, even though less than ten percent of all cases filed in state and federal courts are actually tried to a judge and jury.