Earlier this year, I linked to a Times Online article by legal futurist Richard Susskind with his predictions about the future of legal practice and dispute resolution.

For those eager to learn more about what the future holds, via Slaw, the cooperative Canadian legal research and IT weblog, comes news that “The Next Ten Years“, Richard Susskind’s Society for Computers & Law 2006 Lecture, is available now both in podcast and in edited transcript form. Susskind sets forth his vision of the coming transformation in the nature of legal service, legal education, and dispute resolution that the future holds.

Not only lawyers but alternative dispute resolution professionals will want to pay close attention to Susskind’s views of technology’s influence on the evolution of the practice of law and the resolution of disputes, together with his prediction that client demand will shift focus from dispute resolution to dispute prevention.

And all of us will want to heed his reminder that “The best way to predict the future is to invent it”.

For more information on legal futurism, please see “The future is now: a strategic approach to dispute resolution and the law“, an article which appeared in November on this blog.

Technorati tags: alternative dispute resolution, Culture and Society, Law, Lawyers, legal futurism, mediation, ODR, online dispute resolution, technology

Last June the odr.info weblog linked without comment to an article by right-wing pundit Michelle Malkin on the threat which peer mediation allegedly poses to the American way of life:

The left-wing Kumbaya crowd is quietly grooming a generation of pushovers in the public schools. At a time of war, when young Americans should be educated about this nation’s resilience and steely resolve, educators are indoctrinating students with saccharine-sticky lessons on “non-violent conflict resolution” and “promoting constructive dialogues.”

One year later, guardians of “traditional family values” (whatever those may be) warn of a similar lurking danger that threatens the nuclear family, the sanctity of marriage, and, apparently, the foundations of civilization itself: tolerance towards homosexuals.

Via Objective Justice comes this report of an initiative launched by Concerned Women for America to involve parents in a nation-wide effort to audit their children’s schools for signs that they are promoting the “radical homosexual agenda”. Among the indicia of moral corruption that parents are asked to be alert for?

• anti-bullying policies that include sexual orientation as a protected category
• federal funding of “objectionable programs” such as peer mediation
• programs teaching tolerance and diversity

To see CWA’s “School Audit Form” for yourself, click here for the PDF download.

Technorati tags: conflict resolution, mediation, peer mediation