Foreword
| Author | Terence Daintith |
| Published date | 01 May 1993 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2230.1993.tb02671.x |
| Date | 01 May 1993 |
Foreword
The distinguished articles that fill this special issue of The Modern Law Review
had their origin
-
with one exception
-
in papers prepared for the
1992
W.G.
Hart Workshop at the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies. This Workshop is the
Institute’s major annual academic event, a forum for the review, over several days,
of the latest thinking and practice in a topical area of law. Workshops devoted to
procedural issues have been relatively rare, but the recent dramatic growth of interest
in questions of legal organisation and process in the United Kingdom seemed to
the Institute to justify an attempt to stimulate, through an appropriately designed
Workshop, a serious and broad-ranging treatment of these themes.
The reader will judge the success of this enterprise from the pages which follow,
but at the Institute we are in no doubt that the Workshop fulfilled its function
admirably. In large measure this is due to the contrasting expertise and approaches
of its joint Academic Directors, the one combitling an intensive litigation practice
as
a
senior solicitor with
the
teaching of civil procedure at University College London,
the other a legal anthropologist who has pioneered the teaching of alternative dispute
resolution within the London LL.M degree. Civil procedure, the legacy of centuries
of practical wisdom
-
or at least practice
-
overlaid with continuous piecemeal
reform, might seem an uneasy bedfellow for ADR, with its socially and economically
grounded claims, challenges and certainties, not least because these terms delineate
two potentially competing areas of professional work. We felt, however, that the
intellectual excitement this match might produce far outweighed the risk of provoking
unseemly squabbles over the bedclothes.
In the event, the joint Academic Directors assembled a varied and distinguished
group of British and foreign speakers in a Workshop format permitting the
juxtaposition of reflections from experience in the English High Court with research
findings on informal justice in a variety of contexts, from family proceedings
to
labour disputes.
No
less important, the strong focus on the basic characteristics of
dispute settlement resulting from these multiple approaches enabled the Workshop
participants to tackle sensitive practical issues such as the interconnections between
‘orthodox’ civil justice and ADR with greater serenity than has sometimes been
apparent in professional discussions.
Promoting this kind of open intellectual discussion between lawyers and non-
lawyers, between academics and practitioners, is an essential part of the mission
of the Institute, and we are delighted to see it
so
well fulfilled in a field, that of
the organisation and functioning of the legal system, in which the Institute has been
active in other ways: through seminars, through research on professional legal skills,
and through fellowships for overseas judges and procedural scholars. It is also
satisfying to know that through publication in this Review of papers carefully and
extensively revised in the light of the Workshop discussions, something of the
unusually open and original spirit of those discussions may reach a broad and
international legal public.
Terence
Daintith
Director, Institute of Advanced Legal Studies
February
1993
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