Are There Systemic Ethics Issues in Dispute System Design? And What We Should [Not] Do About it: Lessons from International and Domestic Fronts
This paper reviews ethical issues that occur when systems of dispute resolution are designed for organizations, institutions and situations of iterated disputing and grievances. It explores the state of the art of the field and suggests that ethics codes can be both inductively and deductively derived. After reviewing some ethics issues in both domestic (US) and international contexts, some key ethics issues are described but it is also suggested that the field is too new and under "professionalized" for the formal development of an ethics codes at this point, though some general principles of good practices can be identified.
Establishing Collective Norms: Potentials for Participatory Justice in Rwanda
In June 2002, the Republic of Rwanda embarked on an extraordinary experiment in transitional justice, inaugurating the pilot phase of a new participatory justice system called Inkiko-Gacaca. This article-the result of 8 weeks of research involving interviews with government and nongovernmental organization officials, local judges, and prisoners, and extensive observations of the Inkiko-Gacaca process in several different rural communities-explores the system's potential for healing inter-group conflict through a collaborative process of establishing common social and moral norms. The historical and theoretical background of Inkiko-Gacaca is followed by an in-depth case study of 3 communities. Relating intergroup contact theory to the actual experiences of Rwandans participating in this transitional justice system, we emphasize the need to revise the theory's often-implied assumption of homogeneity in participant perspectives. This analysis illustrates 4 very different levels of trust at which Rwandans par...
Transformation from availability expression to failure frequency expression
The problem of computing the system's Failure Frequency is reduced to the problem of computing its Availability. This is performed by a transformation operator. However, the existing transformation operator is not practical because its transformation time increases exponentially with system size. To overcome this difficulty, this paper proposes a new method of transforming the Availability expression of a system into the corresponding Failure Frequency expression of the system. This method is based on a matrix approach using a 2 /spl times/ 2 matrix consisting of 0, Availability, and Failure Frequency in an appropriate manner. This transformation also enables algorithms for computing the Availability of a system to be transformed into algorithms for computing its Failure Frequency by replacing parameters and operations with matrix parameters and operations. The computation time after transformation is linear with respect to the original Availability algorithm. This implies that the problems of computing other well-known reliability measures including, Availability, Unavailability, MTBF, MTTR, MCT, Failure Rate, Failure Rate, and Failure Frequency, are reduced to only the Availability computation problem.