Introduction

Mediation and conciliation are two alternative dispute resolution processes that garner a great deal of praise in the abstract. One of the leading legal academicians in the United States, the late Lon L. Fuller of Harvard Law School, wrote a seminal article nearly forty years ago commenting that mediation is a 'form of social order'. Elaborating on this idea, Professor Fuller went even further to acclaim mediation as 'directed, not toward achieving conformity to norms, but toward the creation of the relevant norms themselves'. We all recognize that mediation in one form or another has ...