Originally from World Arbitration And Mediation Review (WAMR)

I. INTRODUCTION

Anniversary retrospectives have certain common, even ritualistic aspects. It seems hard to avoid the deep lament for the past, often couched in terms of a lost era of innocence and virtue; a claim of perils and decay in place or at least threatening in the present; and a conclusion that tries to lift the gloomy tone with a few unpersuasive hopes for the future.

A good example of these themes in a well-done version of the standard retrospective is Mark Neubauer’s A 40-Year Retrospective on Litigation, a former editor-in-chief’s summary of changes in American civil procedure over the first forty years of the American Bar Association’s Litigation magazine.1 Neubauer chronicles the loss of innocence in the increasing commercialization of the American practice, the corrosive effect – in Neubauer’s view – of the dissemination in the data reported in the AMLAW 100 (one can certainly observe that providing more information on the market for lawyers has led to changes in lawyer behavior, changes most economists would assume increase personal utility even if they also bring negative externalities), a demise of the much heralded sabbatical programs of the 1970s and early 1980s, a decline in professional-organization participation, a drop in relative judicial pay, a transition from a trial culture to a litigation culture, and the mechanization of computerized legal research.