I will mediate you to death! “It is sad to say that my prediction of almost 10 years ago, that ADR [alternative dispute resolution] processes would be ‘co-opted’ by traditional adversarial processes…has come true,” writes Carrie Menkel-Meadow in the Chicago-based Dispute Resolution Magazine (Winter). “In recent years I have watched lawyers write letters ‘filing an ADR proceeding against’ another party and threatening to ‘change their mediation strategy’ if a particular demand or proposal is not adhered to. Clearly, the language of traditional adversarial practice has taken over or conquered many processes that were supposed to be based on…seeking joint gain, attempting to find Pareto optimal solutions, causing less harm to the parties and exploring solutions to underlying problems.”
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Why did south-side state senator Barack Obama vote against the state budget? Because even half an hour before the scheduled final vote and adjournment “we didn’t know…the overall shape of the budget: what it looked like and where a whole bunch of discretionary funding was going to be going,” he tells Jennifer Davis of Illinois Issues (February). By contrast, the four legislative leaders are said to have signed off on the document almost line by line.
Who does what where? According to information collected from adult males arrested in 1996 and early 1997, “heroin use appears to be focused in a relatively small number of communities located primarily on Chicago’s west side and centered on Garfield Park and Humboldt Park,” writes James Swartz in the Compiler (Winter), a publication of the Illinois Criminal Justice Information Authority. “In contrast, intensive cocaine use appears to be spread over a much larger area of the city, with 24 of the 77 Chicago communities having arrestee rates of cocaine use of 40 percent or greater.”
A perfect relationship. “Most cockroaches are detritivores; they eat dead stuff,” advises University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign entomologist May Berenbaum. “And humans tend to keep a lot of dead stuff in their homes.”
