LAUSR

Abstract Rule of Law development initiatives typically include a preference for formal or State law over informal or customary law. In dispute resolution initiatives, formal court-based adjudication is regarded as the process most likely to promote economic development and certainly as preferable to less formal mechanisms such as mediation. This article compares formal and informal methods of dispute resolution with specific reference to the trajectories of adjudication in the United States and mediation in China. Whereas adjudication seeks generally to resolve disputes in accordance with justice, understood in classical Western thought as the rendering to each what is due, informal dispute resolution is oriented more towards the common good, understood classically as the maintenance of a peaceful social order that allows people to pursue their individual and collective goals in community. These conceptions of justice and the common good are not uncontroversial but their ideologies play a significant role in dispute resolution discourse in both the US and China. This article suggests that developments in each of these jurisdictions have brought about relatively successful pluralist or “hybrid” dispute resolution systems, a suggestion that speaks against any general or fixed preference in dispute resolution initiatives for formal over informal processes.