Court-Appointed Special Masters: Dispute-Resolvers?
by David B. Keller
This article originally appeared in the January 1998 issue of Consensus, a newspaper published jointly by the Consensus Building Institute and the MIT-Harvard Public Disputes Program.
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Special masters are a unique brand of dispute-resolver relatively unknown to many mediators, facilitators, and public officials. A special master is appointed by a judge to oversee one or more aspects of litigation. They may be appointed pre-trial, during trial, or post-trial. Despite their relative anonymity, such masters have been credited with some of the most creative and innovative conflict resolution within the history of the U.S. legal system.
Judges appoint special masters for many reasons, and sometimes these reasons overlap. For example, in a system where judges are usually inundated with cases, special masters may be simply appointed pre-trial in order to free the judge to spend more time on other cases. These masters are almost always attorneys. In construction defect litigation, the special master manages pre-trial discovery and facilitates settlement before trial. In divorce cases, a special master makes recommendations to the judge regarding division of assets and child custody. A special master may be also be appointed pre-trial to manage part of a particularly complex case involving many parties and issues that will take years to litigate
