for their very helpful comments and suggestions regarding earlier versions of this Article and to Donna Stienstra and Deborah Hensler for their assistance with the design of the underlying research project. I am also grateful to Jennifer Brown for her comments and the opportunity to present an early draft of the Article at the Quinnipiac-Yale Dispute Resolution Workshop. I also want to acknowledge: Geoff Sawyer, Charles Kawas, and especially Brian Ford for their research assistance, enthusiasm and diligence; the Pennsylvania Office of Dispute Resolution for its permission to conduct research regarding the special education mediation program; and The Dickinson School of Law of The Pennsylvania State University for the summer research stipend that supported this research. Finally and most importantly, I thank my husband, Eric Munck, and my sons for their support and understanding.

A justice system, and the processes located within it, ought to deliver justice.' That seems simple enough. But, of course, delivering justice is never so simple. Justice and the systems that serve it are the creatures of context. This Article will consider mediation as just one innovation within the much larger evolution of the judicial system of the United States. First, this Article will outline how the values of democratic governance undergird our traditional picture of the American justice system, presumably because the invocation of such values helps the system to deliver something that will be respected by the nation's citizens as "justice." The Article will then highlight particular aspects of the changing picture of the American civil justice system to suggest that today's sprawling and multitiered structure is increasingly disengaged from its democratic roots. Finally, the Article will examine the place of court-connected mediation in this evolution. Is it part of the reinvigoration or further erosion of a democratic justice system? I. THE PROBLEM OF DEFINING JUSTICE Much has been written about the inevitable subjectivity of defining justice. 2 Reflecting different circumstances, personalities, and cultures, people apply widely varying criteria to determine whether particular outcomes are fair.' Equality, need, generosity,

Lawyers should care about their reputations. But exactly what sort of reputation should lawyers seek to establish and maintain in the largely nontransparent context of legal negotiation? And even if a lawyer has developed a reputation as a negotiator, how will he/she know what it is and how it came to be? I force my students to grapple with these questions by incorporating the issues of reputation and reputation development into my negotiation/mediation course. I introduced this innovation at the same time that I decided to increase my focus on developing students' skills in distributive (or value‐claiming) negotiation. Although legal negotiation certainly offers frequent opportunities for the creation of integrative joint and individual gains, the process will almost inevitably involve distribution. The pie, once baked, must be cut. As a result, I now base a portion of my students' final grade on the objective results they achieve in two negotiation simulations. Two dangers of this assessment choice are that it can encourage students to focus only on the numbers and, even worse, engage in “sharp practice”— an extreme form of hard bargaining that tests ethical boundaries — in order to achieve the best short‐term distributive outcomes. Of course, neither a quantitative focus nor sharp practice is synonymous with a distributive approach to negotiation. Nonetheless, to counterbalance the temptations posed by the focus on, and ranking of, objective results, I also base part of students' final grades on their scores on a “Reputation Index.” These scores are based on students' nominations of their peers, accompanied by explanatory comments. This article describes the Reputation Index and how I use it. It also explores the empirical support for the validity of the Reputation Index as a tool for simulating the development and assessment of lawyers' reputations in the “real world.” To that end, the article considers research regarding the bases for lawyers' perceptions of effectiveness in legal negotiation, the sometimes counterintuitive distinction between negotiation “approach” and negotiation “style,” and the relationships among perceptions of negotiation style, procedural justice, trustworthiness, and reputation.

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Two very different contexts of the conflict resolution field -hostage negotiation and court-connected mediation -do share many similarities, particularly with regard to roles, responsibilities, and techniques. In both contexts, the emphasis is on the short-term "fix, " or solution, rather than attention to the underlying reasons for a conflict and long-term societal change. This emphasis, though perhaps changing in the international relations area, permeates much of the institutionalized conflict resolution field and bears further examination by practitioners and researchers.

Due to our current deep economic woes, growing bankruptcy filings, and apparent legislative unwillingness to expand the number of judges, bankruptcy courts are exploring the use of mediation to help resolve adversary proceedings, negotiate elements of reorganizations, and deal with claims that cannot be heard directly in bankruptcy proceedings. 1 There is relatively recent precedent for these uses of mediation. 2 In addition, mediation advocates have been consistent in urging greater use of the process 3 to reduce debtors' and claimants' costs, 4 bridge the

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