Arbitration: Trial by Other Means or Settlement by Other Means?

OVER A CENTURY ago, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. wrote, "The prophecies of what the courts will do in fact, and nothing more pretentious, are what I mean by the law." This definition offered a refreshing realism. It directed those who sought the law to turn away from the abstract legal principles found in dusty books and toward the actual decisions of judges in courts.