While I jokingly said to my striking colleagues that as an ADR professor I was excited by the strike, I was usually met with looks of shock and dismay.  I quickly learned not to speak so excitedly about the strike’s’ similarities to my ADR content because I was quite alone in my enthusiasm. Within the first few weeks of the fall 2017 semester, I provided my students with a document called The Appropriate Dispute Resolution Continuum.  Note the difference between the two titles, Alternative Dispute Resolution and Appropriate Dispute Resolution.  Many Dispute Resolution practitioners believe that the word “alternative” should be dropped from the term as Dispute Resolution is no longer considered an alternative but is now main stream.  Therefore, appropriate dispute resolution connotes a choice in dispute resolution options.  The continuum looks at a simple dispute.  First, when a conflict is discovered, parties can simply choose to ignore it.  If they decide not to ignore it, they move to negotiation (two parties addressing the conflict themselves), mediation (the intervention of a neutral third party), mediation-arbitration (a process whereby a neutral mediator may switch hats and make a decision), arbitration (a quasi-judicial process where a decision is made), and finally adjudication which has a definitive “you win, you lose” outcome.  The continuum also demonstrates who has the power to resolve the dispute.  Clearly, there is more power for the parties to arrive at a mutual resolution during negotiation and mediation.  As they move along the horizontal continuum, parties lose power

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