Divorce

The Conflict Between Getting It Right and Getting It Done

The first was to create a theory to support the practice of divorce mediation. This was born of my belief that the early proponents of divorce mediation had failed to sit down and ask the basic questions that the founders of any new field should pose. The result was that they concluded that if the problem was that divorcing couples had turned to adversarial divorce proceedings, the solution was to provide them with a nonadversarial one, or at least a less adversarial one. As a result, though they considered divorce mediation to represent a repudiation of adversarial divorce proceedings, they unwittingly accepted and incorporated into their thinking, and therefore into their practices, the answers given to those questions by our adversarial legal system and, with it, literally all the assumptions and all the values that informed and gave support to them. Worse, they unwittingly adopted and were then held captive by the picture of the world of divorce subscribed to by our adversarial legal system.