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This article examines how family mediation training was used to construct a bridge between cultural and legal norms in an attempt to help heal a community struggling with assimilation challenges.

As a law professor who teaches civil procedure and mediation, Pursuing Settlement reads like a history. Menkel-Meadow’s uncanny accuracy in predicting the future, her prescient fears for where institutionalization of alternative dispute resolution (ADR) might take us, and the remarkable continued relevance of her suggested reforms and accompanying experimentation combine to make an easy case for declaring her work foundational....

One true measure of whether ideas are “foundational” is whether they will resonate with future generations. Judaism, one of the world’s oldest religions, offers an annual ritual—the Passover Seder—that exemplifies success in passing down foundational ideas. That ritual, among other things, posits that to tell an enduring story, it must be told in ways that inspire many different kinds of people—with widely disparate motivations, perspectives, and abilities—to engage with, relate to, and understand the story. This Essay asserts that Carrie Menkel-Meadow’s dispute resolution scholarship is very much a successful “telling” with many characteristics remarkably similar to the Passover Seder. And that in turn explains why Menkel-Meadow’s work has been so important to the first generation of dispute resolution scholars and practitioners, and why it will endure as foundational for generations to come.

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