ABSTRACT
A fine-grained methodological approach combining contemporaneous, continuous and materially detailed data collection with close sequential analysis helps to capture much of the original coherence of the field. This chapter investigates the work of judicial mediators in the places where judicial mediation occurs naturally. It seeks findings based on such naturalistic observation of how settlement work was organized by judicial mediation participants. The chapter demonstrates the both public and private judge-mediators use legal knowledge, reasoning and assessment in concession-seeking. It finds important differences in the aims, tasks, problems, resources, constraints and case processing practices of mediation at Judicial Arbitration and Mediation Services versus in the public court. The chapter also investigates judicial mediation work as both a lawyer and an ethnographer. The discoverable, local orderliness of judicial mediation work is endogenously built-its objects reflexively organized in ways which make available the resources for their analysis.
