Arbitration is an important feature of the American justice system, providing numerous benefits, such as flexible dispute resolution, efficiency, privacy and avoidance of unwarranted punitive damages, while significantly reducing cases on overloaded court dockets. Its success, however, is not without criticism; and in the case of class arbitration waivers, as this article suggests, that criticism is well founded.
Since the enactment of the Federal Arbitration Act (FAA) in 1925, the United States Supreme Court has pronounced a sweeping policy in favour of arbitration. More recently, the Court has made significant pronouncements in favour of class arbitration waivers, overruling a lower-court trend towards refusing to enforce such waivers.
The Supreme Court’s endorsement of class arbitration waivers unfortunately results in claim preclusion of consumer claims for relatively small amounts of money. Stuck in this relatively inequitable playing field, there exists an opportunity to design innovative solutions to protect consumers from claim preclusion. Online binding arbitration, OArb, offers numerous benefits that offset its drawbacks, and it provides an accessible forum for some consumers to effectuate small claims. While OArb has failed to gain traction as an alternative dispute resolution process, it seems likely that a private, properly administered OArb programme could succeed and provide benefits to companies and consumers alike. OArb, however, is not a complete substitute for class arbitration, especially because numerous consumers are probably unaware of their claims. OArb, nevertheless, is a step in the right direction, and consumers are sure to benefit if it is implemented on a wider scale.

This article captures current trends in online dispute resolution (ODR) and its potential use in Ireland by analysing Irish practitioners’ current attitudes to and awareness of ODR. Ultimately, this work provides the groundwork for future research into Ireland’s use of ODR. This exploratory research will hopefully guide researchers in understanding ODR’s users and consumption.
Data collection came from an online questionnaire sent to conflict intervention practitioners in Ireland who reported their experiences and perspectives of ODR. One hundred and twenty-four surveys were used in this analysis. These questionnaires produced both quantitative and qualitative data. Approximately 900 people were asked to complete the survey.
The author found that surveyed participants were sceptical regarding ODR, with very few actually using online technologies to aid in resolving disputes. A popular sentiment among participating practitioners was that ODR was not better than face-to-face meetings, but that it was worth exploring further. Finally, the author found that those who had heard of ODR are more likely to believe they could assist parties in reaching a final settlement by using video technology.

There is a close link between the growth of Internet usage, the development of mobile technology, the expansion of markets and the increasing number of online dispute resolution mechanisms (ODRs). This article seeks to start a conversation about the need to provide justice by means of effective mechanisms, in particular for e-commerce disputes and transnational litigation. It also provides some information on the recent international initiatives towards the regulation of this new arena, and concludes with an early approach to the future challenges and the impact on training, qualifications and expertise of ODR professionals and service providers.

The present article aims to introduce an innovative educational reform launched by the University of Szeged Faculty of Law. The e-learning initiative of the Szeged Law School offers a chance for both students and lecturers to set aside the traditional Prussian method of education used by the Hungarian professors. Such initiative might, however, have broader implications as well. As such, it can clearly help internationalizing legal education in Hungary and in its neighbouring countries, as well as serve as a great example for other international projects, like online dispute resolution programmes.

For almost a decade, the social medium of Twitter has provided a platform for individuals to instantly connect with others, businesses to build their brands and movements to attract new followers. Yet, although Twitter, Inc. has promoted its product as a customer service application, it has not actively marketed itself as a technology mediated dispute resolution tool (TMDR). This article explores ways in which organizations have utilized Twitter’s power as a conflict avoidance mechanism and as a reputation system, leveraging its ability to provide convenience, trust, and expertise to their followers. It then argues for Twitter, Inc. to actively ‘join the conversation’ of TMDR or risk being left out altogether.

The aim of this article is to examine how the structure of legislation can nurture accessibility and effectiveness of legislation.
It explores whether the legislative drafter in carrying out the task of drafting can nurture effective communication of the policy maker’s intent to the targeted audience by making use of the structure of legislation as a tool, to ensure the legislation is accessible to the end user, and foster effectiveness.
The third and fourth stage of Thornton’s stages of the drafting process – design and composition – would be examined and also Peter Butt’s types of structure, which relates to the drafting of legal documents but would be applied in this paper, to the drafting of legislation.

In considering how society generally is regulated, most times focus is always on Acts of parliament that are passed by the legislative arm of government. However, delegated legislation is another aspect of law making that is of immense importance for the regulation of any given society. This form of lawmaking being a deviation from the norm has some challenges in terms of control. This article seeks to examine some of these challenges emphasising that adequate parliamentary scrutiny will prevent the harbouring of bad-quality legislation.

Statutory interpretation is quickly becoming the primary function of our courts. Ambiguity, unexpected scenarios, and drafting errors in legislation compound this challenging task, obliging many judges to turn to debate transcripts and other legislative materials in search of our elected representatives’ intent.
Legislatures are intrinsically the products of the societies that create them, however, with each possessing a diverging structure and rules of procedure. These institutional differences affect bills’ drafting, consideration, and passage, and represent the mechanical process of how legislative bargains are translated into binding statutory text.
Through the lenses of the United Kingdom Parliament and the United States Congress, the fundamental logic behind these institutions’ legislative bargains will be explored, assessing the impact of procedure and the interests that shape the enacting process. Parliamentary tradition emphasizes the foundational role of Her Majesty’s Government in managing virtually all legislation, maintaining a unity of purpose without compromise, amendment, or purposefully ambiguous provisions. Conversely, unique procedures and the multiplicity of veto players within Congress necessitates that compromise is a de facto requirement for passage. The diverging logic behind these legislative bargains offers powerful evidence that institutional characteristics have a dispositive impact on the utility of legislative materials in statutory interpretation.

Since the 1980s, thousands of Israeli Jews, Palestinian citizens of Israel and Palestinians from the occupied Palestinian territories (oPt) have participated in intergroup dialogues, often referred to as ‘encounter programmes’. In the same historical span, the Israeli–Palestinian conflict has proved thoroughly intractable. Given this political reality, what has been the impact of such initiatives, on direct participants and the conflict context? This article assesses the long-term impact by tracing the post-encounter peacebuilding activity and the evolving perspectives of former participants in three prominent encounter programmes – Seeds of Peace (SOP), Sadaka Reut (SR) and Peace Child Israel (PC) – over periods ranging from a few years to over two decades. Data is drawn from parallel studies conducted by each of the individual authors, encompassing research on 899 programme alumni. The article presents the results of complementary qualitative and quantitative analyses of the long-term peacebuilding engagement of graduates of these three programmes. The organizations profiled employ distinct methodologies, allowing for comparative analysis of interpersonal contact, social identity and critical theoretical approaches. The studies found 183 alumni – approximately one in five surveyed – active in peacebuilding and social change efforts as adults, often 10 or more years after initial participation in encounters. Crucially, long-term peacebuilding engagement was more common among alumni of programmes that explicitly address issues of intergroup conflict and social justice, as opposed to a ‘non-political’ cultural approach. Findings illustrate the potential of intergroup encounters to inspire sustained peacebuilding engagement at the individual level – even in a context of ongoing violent conflict – while highlighting dilemmas imposed by asymmetrical social contexts, and the limitations of micro-level strategies in effecting broader political change.

Indigenous peacebuilding has introduced numerous challenges to the approach of liberal peacebuilding that is well advocated around the world. The conflict in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) of Pakistan presents one such challenge for the local peacebuilders – whereas the implementation of the liberal peacebuilding has failed. Adopting a subaltern perspective, this article examines indigenous cultural peacebuilding resources for this conflict. Prominent among these resources is the philosophy of non-violence and self-restraint of Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan and his Khudai Khidmatgar non-violent movement. The article discusses Khan’s philosophy and the movement it inspired, while making a case for the value of such indigenous resources in the development of culturally appropriate responses for countering militancy and violence in FATA. The article uses the writings of Ghaffar Khan together with secondary resources to suggest measures to counter the contemporary violent extremism by the Taliban and draw upon indigenous approaches to make peacebuilding more effective in FATA.

The roots of conflict, whether international, community or interpersonal, are most often expressed in antagonistic attitudes or perspectives towards ‘the other’. Such attitudes frequently are deeply embedded and resistant to change. Yet lasting resolution of conflict is difficult, if not impossible, unless such attitudes of hatred, mistrust and anger can be addressed. This article begins with insights from science that shows that transformation of such perceptions under certain circumstances can occur. We then describe a well-tested but little known approach to conflict resolution whose design embodies these insights to transform conflicted relationships into more constructive ones. It is only through such transformation of perceptions, attitudes and relationships that the parties themselves become capable of constructively dealing with the economic, social and political issues in the conflict. This approach is called Sustained Dialogue. Sustained Dialogue has its roots in a high-level, U.S.–Soviet, now U.S.–Russia, dialogue, known as the Dartmouth Conference, which first met at Dartmouth College in 1960 and held its 137th session in October 2015. Its focus on transformation of relationships enables Sustained Dialogue to be effective in addressing a very wide range of conflicts, from a civil war in Tajikistan, to tensions between Israeli Arabs and Jews, to ethnic and racial tensions on 60 college campuses around the world and to intracommunity and intrainstitutional conflicts. Sustained Dialogue identifies five components of relationship: identity, interests, power, perceptions, misperceptions and stereotypes, as well as patterns of interaction. Moderators use these five elements not only to understand the nature of a conflict but also to guide the dialogue in ways that encourage transformative experiences. This takes time and occurs throughout the five stages of the process: deciding to engage, mapping relationships and naming problems, probing problems and relationships, scenario building as well as acting and learning together. The Sustained Dialogue Institute in Washington DC trains and encourages the use of this method. To provide the reader with a fuller sense of what this transformation process looks like and some of the results achieved, this article concludes with several illustrations from various kinds of conflicts.

Despite the ongoing debate about the effectiveness of intergroup dialogue for conflict resolution, there is surprisingly little conceptualization of what constitutes successful dialogue. On the basis of a qualitative analysis of three US-based Arab–Jewish dialogue groups, using phenomenological methods and a comparison of case studies, this article presents three main dimensions of success: (1) a shift among group members to ‘living in both worlds’, which means that participants learn to accept the others’ views while still maintaining their own; (2) expansion beyond the group boundaries to include people outside the group such as family members, the larger community members and others and (3) resilience, which means being able to stay in relationship with rival group members without necessarily resolving the conflict. These three dimensions, which are linked together, provide potential criteria for evaluating the effectiveness of dialogue groups. The concept of shift is discussed and refined and contrasted with the more general concept of change. Ideas around generalizability are discussed, and the concept of expansion or ‘rippling out’ is suggested instead. Finally, resilience rather than resolution is offered as one of the main objectives of a successful dialogue.

This article draws upon a wide qualitative study of the experiences and perceptions held by 107 community group leaders and 13 funding agency development officers within the liminal context of Northern Ireland and the Border Counties. These organizations received funding from the European Union’s Peace III Program and/or the International Fund for Ireland. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with key figures in these groups and agencies during the summer of 2010. This data is explored in relation to the concept of hybrid peacebuilding so as to better identify and articulate the potentialities and challenges associated with grass-roots macro-level interactions. The empirical findings indicate the necessity of flexibility in empowering local decision makers in a hybridized peacebuilding process. Local people should be involved with the funders and the governments in constructing and in implementing these processes. The theoretical findings are consistent with previous research that favors elicitive and local rather than top-down bureaucratic and technocratic processes. More attention needs to be paid to how local people see conflict and how they build peace. The prescriptive/practical implications are that policymakers must include the grass roots in devising and implementing peacebuilding; the grass roots need to ensure their local practices and knowledge are included; and external funders must include local people’s needs and visions in more heterogeneous hybrid peacebuilding approaches. The article is original, providing grass-roots evidence of the need to develop the hybrid peacebuilding model.

Between 2011 and 2014, the Vatican City State (VCS) experienced a reform process which dramatically changed its financial system. The process is still ongoing, and its goal is to establish an anti-money laundering and counter-terrorism financing (AML/CTF) system. Importantly, this system will be based on the AML/CTF EU legislation and international standards. These facts are noteworthy. First, the reforms cast light on the main Vatican financial institutions against the background of the secrecy that has always characterized their functioning and business operations. Accordingly, there is now more transparency and information about the Vatican financial system. Second, the relevant EU law and international standards are tools through which the VCS can, for the first time, join an international network of countries, sharing and applying the same rules against money laundering (ML) and terrorist financing (TF). This is of extraordinary importance for a jurisdiction like the VCS, which has never referred to European or international principles in its rule-making. In particular, the openness to EU law and international standards stimulates investigating the reasons behind these changes and the impact that these sources of law are having on a jurisdiction regarded as ‘unique’ in the world.

Anti-corruption is a relatively recent policy which calls for controls. They represent the most effective means in rebalancing institutions which are not fully informed: ‘secrecy’, in fact, characterizes infringements and corrupt behaviour.
Alongside criminal investigation, administrative controls and administrative investigation should be considered crucial because they intervene at early stages, when corruption has been developing, allowing real prevention.
This article analyses some points that we should remember in order to connect controls and corruption correctly: first of all, controls have a hybrid nature: not only are they a way to combat or prevent corruption but also they are real occasions for corrupt transactions; furthermore, controls are a cost and administrative capacity of control is limited; moreover, planning controls is not a simple task; and finally, sanctions following controls must be effective in order to deter.
The article also analyzes what is needed in matters of corruption controls, with special reference to good rules (aiming at a legal system with fewer but better rules, rules which work as incentives, rules capable of designing good institutions). There is also a need for good practices (in order to improve the understanding of corruption processes, to reduce controls, to cooperate in investigating cases of corruption).
Finally, the article warns about the fact that corruption controls produce more bureaucracy and that early detection of corruption would mean, in this perspective, to make a diagnosis of ‘corruptibility’ starting from rules.