CONVENOR Conflict Management

Report on Dispute Resolution Symposium

Chris Honeyman

(originally written for the Institute for Legal Studies' web page)

"What do we need to know about dispute resolution that studying Florida's prodigious experience can tell us?" was the topic of a symposium held on November 13, 1999, at the University of Wisconsin Law School. The event was sponsored by the Institute for Legal Studies in conjunction with the Theory to Practice Project.

In the rapid development of alternative dispute resolution over the past twenty years, Florida has stood out because of the sheer volume of dispute resolution work of all kinds taking place in that state. In addition to developing an astonishing caseload of over 120,000 court-referred mediation cases annually, it is also one of the heaviest users of public policy mediation. The institutional history and professional expertise that have been created as a result make Florida perhaps unmatchable as a venue for sophisticated studies of what dispute resolution does for (and to) whom. Currently, two major studies of the Florida experience are in the planning stage, one by the Florida court system itself and one by a consortium of court, public policy, and academic organizations.

The Institute for Legal Studies has been collaborating on the analysis of the Florida experience with the Theory to Practice Project, a Hewlett Foundation-funded national effort to improve communication between scholars and practitioners of dispute resolution. Project director (and ILS Affiliated Scholar) Chris Honeyman and past ILS Director Marc Galanter were two participants on a six-member team which met in Orlando in August, to advise a team working on the design of the first in-depth analysis of the Florida courts' mediation caseload. The November 13 symposium was to follow up on and intensify this preliminary inquiry.

The symposium brought together a total of 35 people, most of them nationally renowned experts in dispute resolution. A major purpose of the meeting was to help the principal investigators of the two projects configure their studies to consider courts-based issues in the larger context of other players and interests in Florida and nationally. The meeting was led by four of the principal investigators of the proposed studies: Sharon Press, director of the Florida Dispute Resolution Center (which oversees the Florida courts' mediation caseload) and president of the Society of Professionals in Dispute Resolution; Michael Elliott, an expert in public policy dispute resolution at Georgia Institute of Technology; Bob Conners, a Florida-based consultant in race relations issues; and Jim Alfini, professor of law at Northern Illinois University (and former research director for the Florida DRC.) Tom Taylor, deputy director of the Florida Conflict Resolution Consortium (Florida's public policy and land use-focused statewide DR office), stood in for a fifth principal investigator--Bob Jones, Florida CRC Director, who was unable to attend.

Several scholars from the UW Law School and the Urban Planning Department were among those participating, along with a national array of scholars and practitioners, representing an broad range of backgrounds and institutions, including community, public policy, labor, international, family and other areas of mediation practice; research on dispute resolution at RAND, the Federal Judicial Center, the Missouri and Stanford law schools, and a dozen other universities; and management of case streams at federal, state and private agencies ranging from the State Department, and the U.S. Department of Justice to the U.S. Postal Service, the American Arbitration Association and the Wisconsin court system.

While it is too soon to assess the effects of this discussion on studies which are still in the design stage, the post-meeting level of enthusiasm for this approach to drawing out "the good questions" has been very high. Further details about these studies will be posted on the Theory to Practice web page (www.convenor.com/madison) when available.

The symposium immediately followed another scholar-practitioner collaboration involving the ILS and Theory to Practice--the November 11-12 meeting of the Wisconsin Association of Mediators. For the first time, the Institute was a co-sponsor of that organization's annual conference, nine sessions of which were devoted to innovative ways of addressing a wide variety of topics which bring--or ought to bring--scholarly and practical perspectives into juxtaposition. Descriptions of the topics and presenters can be found at www.convenor.com/madison/wam.htm.