The 1986 Airlie House Conference of the Standing Committee on Environmental Law, entitled "The Expanding Role of Private Institutions in Public Environmental Decisionmaking," focused to a large extent on recent efforts to bring alternative dispute resolution procedures into the field of environmental law. Panels on standard setting by consent, negotiated rulemaking, and private facilitating dominated the day's discussions.

Emphasis on alternative dispute resolution represents a welcome long-overdue corrective, and is an important development for the Anglo-American legal tradition. As a Louisiana lawyer, I was raised on the civil law which stresses the importance of non-adversarial community approaches to dispute resolution. The Napoleonic Code used three basic sources in its effort to restate the civil law: the Roman law, the Salic law of the German tribes—as modified by the customs of the French people—and the Canon law.