University of Missouri School of Law Scholarship Repository
Abstract
The thesis of this essay is that when mediators try to resolve a controversy by providing their analysis fo the legal - or other- merits, they are providing the service that judges, arbitrators and neutral experts provide. In essence, such endeavors use the neutral\u27s judgment, award or opinion to determine or jump-start a resolution. That add-on activity to mediation should be called by its proper name. This essay will not review the many reasons that a single neutral combining the roles of facilitator and evaluator is problematic, since that has been done extensively elsewhere.\u27 Instead, in part one, we highlight the advantages of calling mediation plus evaluation a mixed process. In part two, we discuss whether mediation should be allowed to metamorph into an evaluative process for certain case types. In part three, we respond to the contention that virtually every act of an intervener is evaluative and hence proscribing mediator evaluation is impossible
