THE NATURE OF DISPUTES
“Law” is an inevitable necessity of human society. Law facilitates social and economic co-operation and compliance by prescribing rules and principles that are essential to collective or group association. Ideally law has two essential purposes: (a) to prevent disputes and (b) to resolve disputes through the application of reason and not violence.
It is impossible to fully predict what will or won't cause a legal dispute. First, disputes are a part of human life because there are an infinite variety of ways that people can interact with each other. Second, disputes are an incident both of the enormous range of values, standards, norms or mores of any society and also the law itself should be prepared to accommodate a changing world and adapt its principles and rules to reflect prevailing expectations or reasonable perceptions of the common good. For example, should (safe) public flag burning as a gesture of political protest be a crime? When is something obscene? Should a company be allowed to build a dam on a particular river? Should human stem cell research use material from aborted human foetuses? When is a binding contract formed from email correspondence? and so on. When there is a conflict between parties to a specific interaction involving their respective interests, rights or duties then, in the absence of any compromise, a dispute occurs.
COMPLEX LITIGATION
“Complex litigation” might be defined as the formal resolution of any dispute that raises important and extraordinary issues that cannot easily be resolved. Complex litigation, by definition, is harder than other litigation because it takes more intellectual effort to resolve. An experienced lawyer possessing sound judgement skills will recognise a complex legal situation because she or he realises that both sides to the dispute appear to have a good argument. That conclusion will be reached after a careful assessment of the issues raised by the facts of the interaction and because those facts raise an element of uncertainty about predicting the outcome of the dispute. Either the dispute may never have been previously considered or the world has changed since it was considered by a court and the values and norms that applied then do not apply now. Therefore the answer should be different.