The Merger of Law and Mediation: Lessons from Equity Jurisprudence and Roscoe Pound

Almost one hundred years ago, Roscoe Pound' warned about the decline of equity jurisprudence in the American legal system. He called this phenomenon the "decadence of equity."' Though Pound offered several causes for this decline, what we know today as "institutionalization" in the court system was the primary suspect. "The very thing that made equity a system must, in the end, prove fatal to it. In the very act of becoming a system, it becomes legalized, and in becoming merely a competing system of law insures its ultimate downfall." While Pound acknowledged that he saw some good from the "refinements" of equity, he rejected what he labeled the "perversions" that resulted from its being swallowed up by law.