Judicial Dispute Resolution 2001: A Space Odyssey or Modern Reality Check? 

The Honorable Hugh F. Landerkin, Q.C. and Professor Andrew Pirie

"...it is for the court, not the parties, to allocate the precious resources that is the court." Frank E. Sanders, Harvard University, "The Future of ADR", Journal of Dispute Resolution, 2000 at pg. 8. 

In this workshop, a law professor and a judge, both with many years of expertise in the area of dispute resolution, will examine how they constructed the first intensive week long training program for judges in Canada at Royal Roads University, and their sense of its reception and impact on the first Canadian learners.

A cultural sea-change is occurring in our court systems today. With ever-increasing court filings, the party-party controlled adversarial model of dispute resolution is losing its controlling sway. Courts everywhere now appreciate the positive influences that conflict analysis and management can have on their processes. Additionally, courts recognize what social psychologists have discovered in the recent past: the greater the voice given to the disputants in court litigation, the greater the satisfaction and acceptance of the results from court systems, regardless of what the results may be.

The challenge today is to bring justice to everyone's door. No person should be disenfranchised from this goal, for economic, time, or other human reasons. We hypothesize that judges can profit from training in ADR: the theory, the practice, the skills. Judges have a lifetime of skill sets on which to build: they are good listeners, analysts, and decision-makers.

They have experience in problem solving, negotiation, and dealing with conflicted people, businesses, and organizations. Further training in the area of conflict analysis, management, and dispute resolution can only make judges and the court system better.

A critical question remains: can this prototype course be employed in other legal cultures mutatis mutandis?

A trained mediator and arbitrator, along with extensive negotiation and litigation experience as a member of the Bar of Alberta for twenty years, Judge Landerkin continued to develop his interest in ADR when he obtained his Master of Judicial Studies Degree at the University of Nevada, Reno, the only post graduate program designed solely for judges in the United States. His thesis developed a new mediation-arbitration model for the resolution of custody disputes in his Court. 

He has taught Bench and Bar throughout his legal career, as well as at the Faculty of Law and Faculty of Social Work at The University of Calgary. He was the founding president of The Canadian Research Institute for Law and the Family. Active in Bar activities, he served as President of the Calgary Bar Association (1979-80), a Bencher of the Law Society of Alberta (1980-1986), and as chair of the Alberta Law Foundation (1984-1986). He was appointed Queen's Counsel in 1980 (Alberta). 

Professor Andrew Pirie is Professor of Law at the University of Victoria. He teaches courses in ADR, negotiation and mediation theories and practices. He was Executive Director of the UVic Institute for Dispute Resolution, 1989-1996, and has trained individuals and organizations in various countries on disputing skills.

Professor Pirie received his B.A. (Economics) from the University of Waterloo (1972), was the gold medallist for his class in Law, obtaining his LL.B. from Dalhousie University (1975), and received his LL.M. at Victoria University, New Zealand, in 1976. He was called to the Bar of Ontario in 1978 and practiced law with a major Toronto law firm until 1981 when he came to the Faculty of Law, University of Victoria. He has lectured, trained, and written extensively on ADR, here in Canada and abroad in the United States, New Zealand, England, Cambodia, and Thailand. He is the author of a new seminal text on ADR, Alternative Dispute Resolution: Skills, Science, and the Law (Toronto: Irwin Law, 2000).

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