by Chip Rose

In consideration of the responsibility of maintaining a regular column, I get the privilege of hitting clean-up to the excellent topical perspectives by Stu, Pauline and Barbara. Taken together, they represent a description of a professional world so different from the one which confronted me in 1971 when I took my oath as a lawyer, that the term revolutionary is hardly an overstatement. There was much talk of revolution while I was in law school, as the idealism of the "counterculture" and the political activism of the anti-war movement merged together. The tempering effect of a democracy in a republican political structure, rendered much of the rhetoric of the 60's and 70's hyperbolic, as a predictor of social change. On the other hand, in the field of conflict resolution, the contemporaneous emergence of the modern mediation movement began a course change that is nothing short of revolutionary. If we tracked the arc of that change like a Saturn rocket, mediation was the first stage lift off and Collaborative Law is the second stage booster.

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