Alternative dispute resolution methods weren’t formally recognised but still existed when Charles Dickens wrote Bleak House in 1852/3. I’m sure the title referred to the Court of Chancery, not just the eponymous home of John Jarndyce. Dickens was uncomplimentary :
Well may the court be dim, with wasting candles here and there; well may the fog hang heavy in it, as if it would never get out; well may the stained-glass windows lose their colour and admit no light of day into the place; well may the uninitiated from the streets, who peep in through the glass panes in the door, be deterred from entrance by its owlish aspect and by the drawl,languidly echoing to the roof from the padded dais where the Lord High Chancellor looks into the lantern that has no light in it and where the attendant wigs are all stuck in a fog-bank! This is the
Court of Chancery, which has its decaying houses and its blighted lands in every shire, which has its worn-out lunatic in every madhouse and its dead in every churchyard, which has its ruined suitor with his slipshod heels and threadbare dress borrowing and begging through the round of every man’s acquaintance, which gives to monied might the means abundantly of wearying out the right, which so exhausts finances, patience, courage, hope, so overthrows the brain and breaks the heart, that there is not an honourable man among its practitioners who would not give–who does not often give–the warning, “Suffer any wrong that can be done you rather than come here!”
Was it this “wearying out the right” which Lord Clarke the Master of the Rolls was referring to in his recent speech in which he said at paragraph 14 :
Equally, the question will have to be asked whether it is proportionate to other litigants for their particular claim, to be pursued through formal litigation, or whether it would improve access to justice for other litigants if they mediated their case: see CPR 1.1(2)(e).
It seems extraordinary that the tactic employed by wealthy parties, of continuing litigation until their less pecunious opponent runs out of money, was common place even in Dickens time. It remains to be seen if the use of mediation will improve access to justice in these cases. I guess Bleak House would have been a much shorter novel had a Mediator been called in to the case of Jarndyce v Jarndyce.
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