How Mediation Contributes to the “Justice Gap” and Possible Technological Fixes

This Essay’s basic premise is that mediation, as it currently is presented to pro se parties in the lower courts, risks significant depredations of justice. This risk flows directly from the ethics rules that either discourage or outright forbid mediators from providing disputants with exactly the information they need to make informed judgments as they bargain over housing, time with children, and scarce financial resources

The Hopes and Fears of All the Years: 30 Years Behind and the Road Ahead for the Widespread Use of Mediation

Published in cooperation with the American Bar Association Section of Dispute Resolutio

Mediation at the End of Life: Getting Beyond the Limits of the Talking Cure

Mediation has been touted as the magic band-aid to solve end-of-life conflicts. When families and health care providers clash at the end of life, bioethicists and conflict theorists alike have seized upon mediation as the perfect procedural balm. Dissonant values, tragic choices, and roiling grief and loss would be confronted, managed, and soothed during the emotional alchemy of the mediation process. But what is happening in a significant subset of end-of-life disputes is not mediation as we traditionally understand it. Mediation\u27s allure stems from its promise to excavate underlying needs and interests, identify common ground, and push disputants toward more moderate, creative, and mutually satisfying outcomes. But in the growing number of intractable medical futility cases, there is no movement to middle ground. Rather, we have a conversation that leads to a predictable outcome. The provider backs down, and the surrogate gets the treatment that she wants. Mediation\u27s failure was inevitable. It cannot succeed in the shadow of current health care decisions law that gives surrogates so much power. To make mediation work for these cases, we must equalize bargaining power by giving providers a clearly-defined statutory safe harbor to unilaterally refuse requests for inappropriate treatment

ADR and Access to Justice: Current Perspectives

Extract: I want to give you a roadmap for our program. We will not be delivering individual papers but, rather, hope to have a discussion. We are planning to spend thirty minutes on introductions for the purpose of allowing you to identify the source of each panelist\u27s perspectives. We will then use an hour, more or less, for a discussion among the panel. That will leave fifteen minutes for audience questions and participation. Because we will be publishing an edited transcript, we ask that you hold your questions until the end. Access to justice is a broad topic, and we cannot cover everything. You will notice a few major omissions. Most notably, we are not going to emphasize consumer pre-dispute arbitration agreements. This is not because they are not important, but because much has been written and said on this topic, and it could easily swallow the whole discussion. Also, we are probably not going to say very much about restorative justice, and I am sure you will notice some other holes. We invite you to raise missing issues in your comments. Let me start with a few opening remarks. We are building upon earlier panels on access to justice at this meeting. At the ones I attended, I have heard two different themes. One is about the availability of lawyers and the value of legal representation, emphasizing that having a lawyer is a key aspect of access to justice. Another theme asks whether the legal system is providing justice aside from the question of adequate representation in individual cases. This critique emphasizes the extent to which the litigation system is stacked, and ways in which laws fail to recognize the individual realities of the disadvantaged. Both these themes are highly relevant to the role of dispute resolution in access to justice

APC-β-catenin-TCF signaling silences the intestinal guanylin-GUCY2C tumor suppressor axis.

Sporadic colorectal cancer initiates with mutations in APC or its degradation target β-catenin, producing TCF-dependent nuclear transcription driving tumorigenesis. The intestinal epithelial receptor, GUCY2C, with its canonical paracrine hormone guanylin, regulates homeostatic signaling along the crypt-surface axis opposing tumorigenesis. Here, we reveal that expression of the guanylin hormone, but not the GUCY2C receptor, is lost at the earliest stages of transformation in APC-dependent tumors in humans and mice. Hormone loss, which silences GUCY2C signaling, reflects transcriptional repression mediated by mutant APC-β-catenin-TCF programs in the nucleus. These studies support a pathophysiological model of intestinal tumorigenesis in which mutant APC-β-catenin-TCF transcriptional regulation eliminates guanylin expression at tumor initiation, silencing GUCY2C signaling which, in turn, dysregulates intestinal homeostatic mechanisms contributing to tumor progression. They expand the mechanistic paradigm for colorectal cancer from a disease of irreversible mutations in APC and β-catenin to one of guanylin hormone loss whose replacement, and reconstitution of GUCY2C signaling, could prevent tumorigenesis

Chat and Instant Messaging Systems (synchronous): Report 2/ 3

This study extends the earlier review of online chat systems (Report 6), by reviewing a further seven products that provide text-based instant messaging (IM). The functionality of these products in distance education contexts is stressed in relation to their comparative costs, complexity, control, clarity, technical framework, and other functional options