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The paper articulates common organizing narratives which recur within alternative movements in law, and posits the art of dispute resolution as an experimental reconstructive methodology for engaging conflicts, while incorporating a critique of classical liberal thought. The paper offers a reading of conflict resolution approaches, including Alternative Dispute Resolution; Therapeutic Jurisprudence; Restorative Justice, and Transitional Justice, in search of a new legal culture or jurisprudence which emerges from the following narratives: emphasis on process; emphasis on constructive conflict intervention; deconstruction and hybridization; a search for an underlying layer; emphasis on relationship and acknowledgment of emotions; community work and bottom-up development.

The formality of modern law is a constitutive element in its operation, but the “revolt against formalism” and the charge of mechanical jurisprudence are also as old as the law. This chapter focuses on formalism in legal decision-making in hard cases and assumes that contemporary decision-making in law combines formalistic with nonformalistic expressions as part of its routine operation. The research develops a sensitive multidimensional measure that will be used to evaluate legal texts by examining various vectors of formalism. It begins by exploring diverse jurisprudential cultures of formalism, which have developed mainly in American legal thought. Based on the historical analysis of cultures of formalism, the chapter continues to frame eight claims of formalism that have all been contested in legal writing. It proposes to examine the following parameters, based on these claims: (1) the introduction and framing of the legal question; (2) the use of extralegal arguments; (3) reliance on policy arguments and on legal principles; (4) reference to discretion and choice; (5) the relationship between what is presented as facts and what is presented as norms; (6) preservation of traditional boundaries in law; (7) the use of professional judicial rhetoric; (8) the gap between law in the books and law in action; and (9) judicial stability and institutional deference. Each of these parameters can be used to evaluate the level of formalism in a concrete text. The interplay between diverse evaluations of the same case is a subject for inquiry and contemplation. These parameters can also be redefined as variables for a quantitative content analysis, and legal decisions can be coded accordingly. This will enable an analysis of differences between justices, legal issues, legal jurisdictions, and time frames, as well as the correlation between the various parameters of formalism. The tendency to formalism, according to the analysis here, is never pure and is part of a complex legal culture that usually combines formalistic elements with nonformalistic ones.

The present paper attempts to map the discursive relations between conflict and settlement as reflected in the realms of law and mediation during the second half of the 20th century, offering a 21st century model to combine the mediation drive to settle through reaching inter-subjective transformation with the legal drive to escalate and promote social conflict. Contemporary mediation, according to this model, should involve on the one hand “negotiating for justice,” according to the familiar models of problem solving and transformation, and on the other hand “fighting for law”: acknowledging the self-referential and ideological quality of conflicts, while emphasizing the pragmatic need to end them through an interpretive public act that involves value judgments.