NCJ Number
100112
Date Published
1985
Length
215 pages
Annotation
This analysis of governmental policy regarding informal dispute processing, coupled with a case study of a neighborhood justice center, links the reform movement toward informal proceedings and mediation with an order maintenance style of exercising state authority.
Abstract
An examination of the ideology of informalism in dispute processing concludes that mediation is less distinct from traditional legal forms than reformers realize. The book discusses dispute processing reform in its broader social and political contexts: the rise of judicial management in the Progressive era of the late 19th and early 20th centuries and the reconstruction of court unification in the 1970's. In the earlier period, reformers attempted to replace the Justice of the Peace Courts with informal branches of the Municipal Court, such as the Small Claims Court. Efforts to reconstruct judicial management in the 1970's shifted toward a decentralized management model like the neighborhood justice center. A look at the Kansas City Neighborhood Justice Center, established in 1978, examines referral sources and compares sanctions and rates of participation and nonparticipation in mediation and similar court hearings. Participation rates, problems encountered, and sanctions were found to be similar in both types of proceedings. Tables, over 350 references, and an index are supplied.