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Here we discuss the current state of ADR law, practice, and education in South Africa, with a particular focus on the potential role for mediation in commercial disputes. Our angle is to frame the material with a discussion of economic and contract theory, particularly that on private ordering and relational contracting. We link this socio-legal theory to more specific theory on ADR itself, and then go on to contextualise ADR in South Africa. We discuss the role of ADR in commercial practice generally, as well as providing a detailed account of the South African construction industry specifically. Our major conclusion is that ADR is often the most appropriate form of dispute resolution, particularly where social capital is at stake. This provides the link between ADR theory and private ordering/relational theory. Another important conclusion is that South Africa needs more specialist mediators, as well as a legal and political environment which incentivises such training.

Full-text available at SSRN. See link in this record. ; With its focus on private legal systems, the private ordering literature sets up a seeming dichotomy between public court adjudication of disputes, applying publicly created laws, and private arbitral adjudication of disputes, applying privately developed rules. Trade association arbitrations fit neatly into the latter category; public courts fit almost as neatly into the former. But while the dichotomy highlights the cases of most interest in the private ordering literature, it is too simple. It gives the appearance of an all-or-nothing choice - all public dispute resolution or all private dispute resolution - when in fact hybrid choices are common. This article seeks to add to the private ordering literature in two ways. First, it argues that international commercial arbitration, while sometimes cited as an example of private ordering, is in fact - a hybrid case - with important elements of public involvement supplementing the use of a private decision maker. Too often, international arbitration is grouped with trade association arbitration in ways that blur the important distinctions between the two. Not all arbitration is alike, and not all parties that agree to arbitrate opt out of the legal system altogether. Second, this article examines attributes of international transactions that help explain party choice among these different mechanisms of resolving disputes. It considers four attributes: (1) distance - geographic, as well as cultural and political - between the parties; (2) the complexity of the good or service; (3) the clarity of the applicable national law; and (4) the importance of speedy resolution of disputes. Trade association arbitration is most likely to be used for transactions in simple goods, although less likely in international transactions involving greater distances than domestic transactions. International commercial arbitration is the more likely choice for international transactions, except in cases in which the applicable law ...

The Rawlsian texts appear not to be consistent with regard to the status of the right of freedom of association. Interestingly, Rawls's early work omits mention of freedom of association as among the basic liberties, but in his later work he explicitly includes freedom of association as among the basic liberties. However, freedom of association would appear to have an economic component as well (e.g., the right to form a firm). If one turns to such "private ordering" (e.g., contract, partnership, and corporate law), we find a similar ambiguity in the Rawlsian texts, as well as sharp divisions in the contemporary literature on Rawlsianism. This ambiguity has engendered widespread confusion over the scope of the two principles of justice—leading to the contemporary dispute over the breadth of what Rawls calls the "basic structure" and the question of whether the principles of justice are properly understood to govern private ordering. There is significant disagreement over the breadth of Rawls's basic structure—one aspect is whether the principles of justice apply to the private law. In a controversial passage in Political Liberalism Rawls addresses this question. This passage has, however, led commentators to reach divergent conclusions. We argue that this disagreement is explained by an instructive confusion in the passage over the distinction between what we characterize as "pre-institutional" and "post-institutional" freedom (vis-á-vis contract and property). The passage, we argue, illicitly shifts from invoking the post-institutional sense of "freedom" to the pre-institutional sense, thereby causing significant though understandable disagreement. Rawls's lapse into the pre-institutional conception of "freedom" provides interpretive grounds for the narrow understanding of the basic structure. If Rawls, however, had invoked the sense of "freedom" to which he is entitled at this stage of his theory—the post-institutional conception—such disagreement need not have arisen.

We stand at an unprecedented moment in the history of exclusive private rights in information ("EPRIs").' Technology has made it possible, it seems, to eliminate to a large extent one aspect of what makes information a public good-its nonexcludability. A series of laws-most explicitly the Digital Millennium Copyright Act ("DMCA") and the Uniform Computers Information Transactions Act ("UCITA")-are building on new technologies for controlling individual uses of information goods to facilitate a perfect enclosure of the information environment. The purpose of this Essay is to explain why economic justifications interposed in favor of this aspect of the enclosure movement are, by their own terms, undetermined. There is no a priori theoretical basis to claim that these laws would, on balance, increase the social welfare created by information production. The empirical work that could, in principle, predict the direction in which more perfect enclosure will move us has not yet been done. Empirical re- search that has been done on the effects of expanded EPRIs - in the context of patents - is quite agnostic as to the proposition that EPRIs are generally beneficial, except in very specific industries or markets. We are, in other words, embracing this new legal frame- work for information production and exchange on faith. Given the tremendous non-economic losses-in terms of concentration and commercialization of information production and homogenization of the information produced - that a perfectly enclosed information environment imposes on our democracy and our personal autonomy, such a leap of faith is socially irresponsible, and, as I have argued elsewhere at great length, probably unconstitutional. It used to be that the distribution technology of information goods was such that once they were uttered-say, a copy of a book was released-the owner could do little to prevent significant dissemination of the information by the holder of the medium of the utterance. One could lend the book to a friend, quote passages, ...

"Private ordering" is an important concept and commonly-used phrase in legal scholarship. At least three "ordering" activities often performed by governments can be privatized: lawmaking, adjudication, and enforcement of adjudicators' decisions. Distinguishing among these activities and offering lasting lessons on their privatization—but nowadays not often credited for doing so—is Soia Mentschikoff's seminal 1961 article, Commercial Arbitration. This short piece reconsiders Mentschikoff's classic article in light of contemporary scholarship on private ordering and credits Commercial Arbitration with teaching us lasting lessons about commercial arbitration and even about commerce itself. Key to these lessons is Mentschikoff's empirical study of trade association arbitration and her comparison of such industry-specific arbitration with the more general commercial arbitration exemplified by the American Arbitration Association (AAA). This comparison shows arbitration's ability—especially in the "core commercial" context of trade associations—to privatize all three of the aforementioned "ordering" activities: lawmaking, adjudication, and enforcement of adjudicators' decisions. Mentschikoff thus builds impressively from the humble context of routine sales disputes to enduring insights about the role of private ordering in the production, application, and enforcement of law.