This review is a guest post written by Sarah Phillimore, barrister at St John’s Chambers, Bristol. Sarah joined St Johns Chambers in January 2011 from Coram Chambers in London. She has experience of all areas of family law and is training to become an accredited family mediator.
Family Mediation: Appropriate Dispute Resolution in a new family justice system, Lisa Parkinson (2nd Ed 2011)
For about the last ten years I had seen myself as a particularly forward thinking and enlightened family lawyer, frequently holding forth about the potential benefits of mediation to resolve family law disputes. I was somewhat peeved to discover by page 4 of Lisa Parkinson’s text that I am several thousands years too late. She points out that Confucius in 5BC urged people to meet with a neutral peacemaker, rather than risk going to court which may leave them embittered and unable to co-operate.
It raises perhaps uncomfortable questions about human nature that the benefits of mediation have been recognised for thousands of years but for most of them we have clung to a largely adversarial family law system which encourages participants to think of themselves as ‘winners’ and ‘losers’.
Part III of the Family Law Act 1996 began to push at the door by requiring those who wanted public funding to at least consider the prospect of mediation (as re-stated in the Access to Justice Act 1999). More recently, the Government has made it very clear that active steps will be taken to encourage people to mediate due to the speed, cheapness and perceived better outcomes provided by mediation.
Lisa Parkinson recognises that a simplistic portrayal of mediation as ‘good’ and litigation as ‘bad’ is not fair to either system but the central message of her text is that disputants who risk being caught up in adversarial proceedings – at great emotional and financial cost – surely have a right to know the differences between mediation and litigation so that they can make an informed choice.