“The entire legal profession, lawyers, judges, and law professors, has become so mesmerized with the stimulation of the courtroom contest, that we tend to forget that we ought to be healers of conflict. . . Reliance on the adversarial process as the principal means of resolving conflicts is a mistake that must be corrected. . . For some disputes, trials will be the only means, but for many claims, trial by adversarial contest must in time go the way of the ancient trial by battle and blood. The existing judicial system is too costly, too painful, too destructive, too inefficient for a truly civilized people.”
– Chief Justice Warren Burger, Annual Report on the State of the Judiciary, 1983