Christine B. Harrington

Ideological Production: The Making of Community Mediation

Through an analysis of the structure of the community mediation movement in the United States and an ethnography of the practices of mediators in local programs, this paper examines how community mediation is made, and how it is ideologically constituted. The ideology of community mediation is produced through an interplay among three ideological projects or visions of community mediation and organizational models, and by the selection and differential use of mediators to handle cases. We argue that ideologies are formed through the mobilization of symbolic resources by groups promoting different projects. Central to the production of mediation ideology is a struggle over the symbolic resources of community justice and consensual justice. Although various groups propose differing conceptions of community justice, they share a similar commitment to consensual justice, and this similarity is produced through reinterpretations of the same symbols. The ambiguities in community mediation are, it appears, being overtaken by consensus on the nature of the mediation process itself.

Shadow Justice: The Ideology and Institutionalization of Alternatives to Courts.

This first critical examination of informal dispute processing links the institutionalization of alternatives to the court process and the ideology of informalism with the evolution of the American court system. The author connects dispute processing reform to the broader social and political context in which it developed, including the rise of judicial management in the Progressive period and the reconstruction of court unification in the 1970s. Harrington defines legal resources and their distribution in alternative dispute resolution policy before focusing on the institutionalization of this reform in a case study of a federally sponsored Neighborhood Justice Center. In conclusion, Harrington finds that the symbols of informalism and its institutions are a mere shadow of conventional legal practices.

Lawyers in a postmodern world : translation and transgression

Part 1 Understanding lawyering: the symbol traders outlining a theory of legal practice. Part 2 Constituting capital and the state: legal creativity capital fractionalized blurred boundaries - the overlapping world of law, business and politics lawyers as constitutive of gender relations the forum should fit the fuse - the economics and politics of negotiated justice. Part 3 Towards prefigurative legal practices: miners and lawyers feminist legal scholarship and womens gendered lives paralegals and prefiguration - working in black townships towards a post-apartheid South Africa the contradictions of radical law practice.