Mediators are often pulled in many directions—they want to help their clients reach a speedy agreement, ensure the agreement is fair, and avoid coercion so they can honor mediation’s primary value of party self-determination. Can we have it all? In this groundbreaking resource, Dan Simon and Tara West illustrate how self-determination can mean much more than the absence of coercion—it can mean the opportunity for participants to increase their sense of agency as they gain clarity and confidence to make their own decisions, including those that express their highest values. Offering psychological research, philosophical principles, and real-life mediation stories, the authors examine where self-determination belongs in relation to other values, such as fairness, protection, and efficiency, as they wrestle with how to apply their principles in particularly challenging divorces, workplace conflicts, and more. Readers will be challenged to think deeply about how their values and assumptions guide their practice, and they will be inspired to more fully embrace their commitment to self-determination.

Traditional ideas of mediator neutrality and impartiality have come under increasing attack in recent decades. There is, however, a lack of consensus on what should replace them. Mediation Ethics offers a response to this question, developing a new theory of mediation that emphasises its nature as a relational process.

Omer Shapira proposes and justifies a theory of mediators' ethics which guides mediators' conduct and applies to mediators at large.

Proponents of the “contemporary mediation movement” promised that parties would be able to exercise self-determination as they participated in mediation. When courts began to mandate the use of mediation, commentators raised doubts about the vitality of self-determination. Though these commentators also suggested a wide variety of reforms, few of their proposals have gained widespread adoption in the courts.Ensuring the procedural justice of mediation represents another means to ensure self-determination. If mediation provides parties with the opportunity to exercise voice, helps them demonstrate that they have considered what each other had to say, and treats them in an even-handed and dignified manner, it is more likely that the parties will share information that will lead to a result that actually represents the exercise of their selfdetermination.Recent research, however, counsels that status affects procedural justice perceptions, voice is not always productive, and parties who are marginalized or lower status may neither expect nor desire to exercise voice. Further, research indicates that even those parties in mediation who value voice may not value participating in the back-and-forth or bargaining process that is required to arrive an agreement.After reviewing this and other research, the Article proposes the following reforms to enhance the likelihood that mediation will provide all parties with voice, trustworthy consideration and real, substantive self-determination: increasing the inclusivity of the pool of mediators; training all mediators to acknowledge and address implicit bias; training mediators to engage in pre-mediation caucusing that focuses on developing trust; institutionalizing systems for feedback and quality assurance; training mediators to model reflective listening; adopting online technology that provides parties with pre-mediation information they need to engage in informed decision-making and the opportunity for self-analysis and self-reflection; and perhaps even identifying additional areas of mediation practice in which mediators would be required to take affirmative steps to avoid unconscionable unfairness or coercion.

Ethics and Justice in Mediation provides guidance for mediators through the ethical and practical challenges that arise in different mediation contexts. Mediation has developed beyond its infancy, and continues to evolve. As it matures, both new benefits and dilemmas emerge from the growing body of mediation experience, and require all mediators, whether new or experienced, to embrace change. There is now a significant focus on the ethical issues arising from the way a mediation is conducted; more specifically, the impact of a mediator's decisions on the parties and on the outcome. Given the sheer diversity of situations that a mediator might face, the challenge of ensuring an ethical process, and a just outcome, is becoming acute. Ethics and Justice in Mediation equips mediators with the skills required to identify the approach best suited to achieving just and ethical outcomes. It outlines the relevant mediation standards and values that apply and demonstrates the different approaches available to mediators to help them ensure balanced outcomes for all parties to a mediation. Guidance is provided by a scenario-based approach in which experienced mediators' responses, to several real-life situations, are shared to highlight the ethical and practical issues that may arise. The authors are experienced mediation specialists, well-qualified to present crucial ethical issues that mediators commonly face - but which have previously received little attention in mediation texts. Presenting six different mediation scenarios, they outline the relevant mediation standards and values applicable to each, enumerate the different approaches that may taken, and how these relate to the standards. Each scenario concludes with suggestions on how to approach the issues identified in the scenarios. By providing these practical suggestions for applying an ethical approach in these situations, it endeavors to ensure that mediations provide just outcomes.

This book examines mediation topics such as impartiality, self-determination and fair outcomes through popular culture lenses. Popular television shows and award-winning films are used as illustrative examples to illuminate under-represented mediation topics such as feelings and expert intuition, conflicts of interest and repeat business, and deception and caucusing. The author also employs research from Australia, Belgium, Canada, China, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, India, Israel, Japan, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Singapore, South Africa, Spain, the United Kingdom and the United States of America to demonstrate that real and reel mediation may have more in common than we think. How mediation is imagined in popular culture, compared to how professors teach it and how mediators practise it, provides important affective, ethical, legal, personal and pedagogical insights relevant for mediators, lawyers, professors and students, and may even help develop mediator identity.