The Dispute Resolver’s Role Within a Dispute System Design: Justice, Accountability, and Impact

Abstract

How can dispute resolvers play a role in making systems accountable? How do we define and measure accountability for DSD? This essay will advocate using lateral thinking by crossing several different silos of scholarly work in law, political science, public administration, psychology, and philosophy. It introduces DSD, its history, and a related research area, Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD). It then discusses DSD as it occurs across the policy continuum through collaborative governance for public and private institutions. The article next turns to how dispute resolvers should approach justice, accountability, and impact in DSD. It introduces accountability and performance measurement of impact from public administration. It explores how we might apply concepts of justice from psychology, philosophy, and jurisprudence to measure accountability. This article will then apply these concepts to the lawyer and dispute resolver's roles in accountability for DSDs involving forced or mandatory arbitration, the systematic suppression of evidence of sexual abuse by priests of minors in Spotlight, and Ferguson, Missouri's systemic racism in the DSD for the local criminal justice system of police and courts. It concludes that as dispute resolvers, we need transparency in how DSDs promote justice; we need to build accountability and performance measurement into DSD; and we need to take responsibility for helping ensure these systems are accountable to the people who use them and to the public.

Keywords: dispute resolution, dispute system design, ethics, accountability, justice

JEL Classification: I2, I28