ODR and Social Justice: Technology not Tricknology

Reducing barriers to a system of justice that may be experienced as unequal is providing access to that unequal justice, but no social justice. When one thinks of online dispute resolution being asked to do more than better provide the justice the system provides – something that many experience already as very hard in the various polities – it seems a bridge too far in my view. It should be quite obvious that online dispute resolution cannot be the magic bullet to get us to social justice. At most, it can assist the providing of justice if its forms protect the kinds of norms we have described above. Put another way, it would be wonderful if online dispute resolution did not exacerbate social injustice that may be endemic to the laws and norms of a given polity. To ask online dispute resolution to cause that polity to change those unequal laws and norms is to require a methodology to impact powerful groups in a polity and change them. That kind of change being a movement derived from online dispute resolution as opposed to some other wellspring of discontent would appear unlikely.