"A common thread pervades all court room contests: lawyers are natural competitors, and once litigation begins they strive mightily to win using every tactic available . ... litigation is not only stressful and frustrating but expensive and frequently unrewarding for litigants... There must be a better way."

Chief Justice Warren E. Burger

The above words from Chief Justice Burger's address at the 1982 mid year meeting of the American Bar Association express a widespread increasing dissatisfaction with legal proceedings in the United States. Critics point to mounting case backlogs, ever growing costs of litigation, and, in some instances, questionable social policies that emerge from the judicial resolution of disputes. This issue of PERSPECTIVES concerns the search for better ways to dispense justice which Chief Justice Burger called upon the legal community to find. It begins with an article by lawyer-sociologist Michael Joseph Rosanova which describes one promising recent development-divorce related mediation. Under this approach the parties to a divorce attempt to settle such issues as child custody, visitation rights, division of property, and so forth through a voluntary agreement arrived at with the aid of a trained mediator. Rosanova, who has pioneered the development of divorce related mediation in Illinois, provides an overview of both its underlying theory and the practical problems surrounding its implementation.

The increased use of voluntary arbitration has been advocated as a means both of expediting medical malpractice claims and containing the cost of medical malpractice insurance. The second piece in this issue of PERSPECTIVES is excerpted from a study under the auspices of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare evaluating a project in which patients at eight hospitals in southern California agreed to submit any malpractice claims they might file to arbitration. The HEW study compares the hospitals participating in the project with a contrast group in regard to various critical matters related to the processing of malpractice claims.

Chief Justice Burger confined his remarks about the shortcomings of adversarial legal proceedings specifically to the civil law. The adversarial character of criminal trials, however, has recently been the subject of searching criticism by a number of prominent legal scholars. Robert Ladenson describes the views of two such scholars, Lloyd Weinreb and John Langbein. Weinreb and Langbein both point to the countries of continental Europe for examples of distinctly less adversarial modes of criminal procedure which may serve as useful models for judicial reforms in the United States. Ladenson also discusses how the proposals advocated by Weinreb and Langbein bear upon some of the most difficult questions of legal ethics for criminal defense attorneys.