For those of you who have not been reading novelist Lee Child’s Jack Reacher series, Jack Reacher is an ex-Army MP who drifts around the country trying to live anonymously and alone but instead inevitably–once per novel, in fact–getting involved in some local power struggle that requires him to take matters into his own hands (often literally; Reacher has the reflexes of a cat and the skills of an assassin, and has absolutely no compunction about killing bad guys) and set things right for the good people of the community before moving on.

The first Jack Reacher movie is coming out this December. The trailer (available here) starts off with a gritty voiceover:

There’s this guy. He’s a kinda cop. Least he used to be. He doesn’t care about proof. He doesn’t care about the law. He only cares about what’s right.

The trailer-makers are drawing a familiar distinction here, between what counts as proof/law and what is morally right. Fears that the law has been disconnected from morality, usually by powerful and corrupt state and corporate interests, often emerge in our popular stories. We have seen these kinds of conflicted heroes before (Dexter, Robin Hood, Luke Skywalker and the Rebel Alliance, just to name a few): people who, in the absence of a functioning political structure capable of making good on the social contract, must break the law to protect and preserve greater social values, including justice itself.

I bring all this up because last week we had our first meeting of this year’s ADR student group and I found myself wondering how many of them were there because they did not feel like “the law” was “right,” either for them personally/professionally or for society more generally. My ADR students often express strong reactions against legal institutions and processes, and many of them come to ADR seeking ways to effectuate positive change without legal or political intervention. I want to support them in their reformist idealism, and in so doing have sometimes conflated “ADR” with “what’s right” (which may have, perhaps, implicitly distinguished “the law” from “what’s right”).

But an ADR-only stance is not really that useful, especially for people (like our students) who want to work on complex multiparty problems, such as environmental disputes and decisionmaking. Jack Reacher may be able to save all the good people and kill all the bad ones, but our students will not have the benefit of a fictionalized context to work within and so will never have the narrative clarity and closure (not to mention the superhuman powers) that Jack has.

Then again, the fact that one cannot solve all problems with ADR alone does not mean that an ADR focus isn’t a good idea. In fact, developing a strong ADR focus may help students avoid being “captured” by the hierarchy and inertia of traditional legal culture.

I stressed over how to be supportive and realistic without disillusioning them. So at this year’s meeting, I split the difference and told the students that ADR is not separate from the law but exists as a vibrant and necessary part of the law, which itself is a vibrant and necessary set of institutions and practices, and that as law students they will learn how to work both sets of levers within a multidimensional environment. Apparently this was not as provocative as I thought it would be. They were unruffled; I think someone may have asked whether there would be pizza at the next meeting.