The document discusses how money carries symbolic meaning and emotional value beyond its rational economic value. It can represent responsibility, sympathy, community obligations, and express societal norms. Mediators should be aware of these deeper meanings when parties assign monetary values to harms and how narratives around money can shift to resolve disputes or prevent impasse. The mediator's goal is to interrupt cycles of blame and change the conflict narrative to one with alternative interpretations that recognize common ground.

1. PREVENTING AND BREAKING IMPASSE BY UNDERSTANDING THE SYMBOLIC MEANING OF MONEY

8. Peeling the Onion of Injustice

10. American Metric for Injustice is Money Money reduces the qualities of dissimilar experiences into similar ones by using a common metric. In law, the metric is the cause the action, comprised of pre-determined elements that give rise to a right to redress in a Court of law. On being fired from her job as party planner and celebrity magnet at the Hollywood Roosevelt and Beverly Hills Tropicana Hotels, Ms. Demme said, “I feel accomplished at what I did. I feel hurt at what went down. And I have a lawyer who will deal with my hurt.” New York Times April 16, 2006

11. Injustices that the law will rectify dwarfed by the injustices it will not. Many non-actionable injustices are considered frivolous claims. Because the parties’ “interests” almost always include non-actionable injustices, mediators can address the entire world of injustice. Actionable injustices * * Much larger than actual size World of Injustice

12. “ Objective” Actionable Injustice commensurates Wrongs Stories are subsumed in legal theory. Facts exist simply to be plugged into legal theory, and facts that cannot find a home in some legal element are deemed virtually irrelevant. The process of theory development is quantifiable, neat, and quite sterile.

14. DAY IN COURT = PUBLIC ACKNOWLEDGEMENT OF MORAL WRONGDOING The primary reason such a great percentage of the 9-11 victims’ families were reluctant to sign up for the Compensation Fund was their desire to “get their apology or acknowledgement of fault and responsibility from some group or organization” rather than to simply accept money for their losses. Tyler & Thorisdottir 2003:361-362.

26. Money Communicates Intent and Societal, Moral and Business Values

27. We remain ambivalent about valuing physical injuries and loss of life In every society with surplus wealth, legal systems have evolved to replace vengeance and feud with systems of monetary compensation (blood money, wergeld or composition) for personal and commercial losses. Ancient Babylonia and Anglo-Saxon legal codes contained schedules of payments for common types of personal wrongs such as killing, maiming and theft.”