ABSTRACT
In designing mechanisms appropriate to disputes, a principal claim of ADR scholarship is for the need to acknowledge and respond to diversity – diversity in the types of disputes that may justify intervention, in the parties to a dispute and their interests and values, in the forms that dispute resolution may take, in the need or demands for community involvement in dispute resolution processes and outcomes. At the same time one can recognize that distinctive patterns and traditions of dispute resolution emerge. Perceptions of grievances and bases for conflict are interpreted through societal, group and individual attitudes as well as by legal rules. So also are understandings of which dispute resolution processes and interventions are valid, useful and accessible. The interplay of these perceptions and understandings of what makes for a grievance or conflict and the means available for dealing with them can be said to form the dispute resolution ‘system’ in any community. The result of this interplay is to define what disputes are valid, which dispute resolution processes applicable and valid, and how disputes are managed. The outcome of this process may be ultimately to enhance the role of law and lawyers or to exclude legal rules and processes either inadvertently, by custom, or even explicitly as in certain forms of arbitration (see Macaulay 1963; Beale and Dugdale 1975; Ferguson 1980).
