Thirty Five Years of Mediation: Why Haven't We Come Farther?

Using mediation to resolve disputes can be traced, across a variety of cultures, to biblical and ancient times. In this country, the founding fathers recognized the process but mediation did not have a valid place in American policy until 1946 when the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service (FMCS) was formed to resolve labor disputes.

The 1960s brought the civil rights, feminist, environmental, and peace movements along with dissatisfaction with governmental and other institutions. These cultural trends planted the seeds for paradigm shifts and social change. The courts were backlogged and so a push for a better way to resolve disputes ensued.

In 1976 Chief Justice Warren Burger held a conference and ceremony to commemorate the anniversary of Pound’s Paper of 1906 in St Paul, Minnesota. At the Roscoe Pound Conference of 1976 legal scholars met to brainstorm possible improvements to the American legal system. The potential of the mediation process was acknowledged and Chief Justice Berger gave his “blessing” to the start of the ADR movement as we know it. That was 35 years ago. Today, the average person and the average legislator still doesn't understand the concept and how the mediation can be best utilized. What went wrong? Why haven't we come further? What can we do so that we are not having the same discussion ten, twenty, or thirty years from now?

PS. A Westernized form of Hindu meditative techniques arrived in the United States and Europe in the 1960s. A 2007 study by the U.S. government found that nearly 9.4% of U.S. adults (over 20 million) had practiced meditation within the past 12 months, up from 7.6% (more than 15 million people) in 2002. Why has meditation done so much better than mediation?