Year: 1984
Type: article
Abstract: CONCILIATION "Consent, if mutual, saves the lawyer's fee, Consent is law enough to set you free."DIVORCE has both a public and a private dimension.Marriage is a social institution, but is also a contractual relationship conferring rights and responsibilities on husbands and wives.This is a contract like no other.When the arrangement breaks down, at least one partner is liable to have experienced the loss of a relationship which they valued; they may also have lost, or be in the process of losing, their home and their children.Submission to the legal process reinforces this loss of status and personal prestige.The divorcing couple may not understand the law, its procedure, or its documentation; they may also have to submit to a humbling process of investigation and in many cases they are forced to accept that decisions about their children are being taken out of their hands.Furthermore, when the marital relationship comes to an end, this often reflects long-standing family problems which courts cannot finally resolve.Separation may also create new difficulties, for example, over access arrangements.Many of the issues have to be compressed and defined artificially to fit a legal context.But when the whole process has been gone through and the experts have dropped away, the divorced couple (and in particular, divorced parents) have to find some means of carrying on their separate lives, whilst remaining in contact with each other.The most attractive and distinctive feature of mediated divorce settlements is the opportunity which they provide, or are thought to provide, for the parties to exercise a degree of control over decisions affecting their own and their children's lives.While court adjudication is positively welcomed by some couples, there is another group, the size of which can only be guessed at, who, although unable immediately to agree matters between themselves, would be able, given sensitive and unobtrusive assistance, to retain a considerable measure of responsibility for the decisions which have to be reached.Such help might be offered in the relatively early stages of mamage breakdown, before the legal process has been embarked upon, and away from the formal atmosphere of the courts.These thoughts led many of us to welcome the setting up of an inter-departmental committee to report on "the nature, scope and effects" of existing conciliation services and "to consider whether those or further facilities should be promoted or developed . . .within existing resource planning."'
Source: Modern Law Review
Authors: Gwynn Davis, John Westcott
Institution: University of Bristol
Language: English
Subfield: Strategy and Management
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W2083280992