Indeed, in cases where individuals feel their rights have been trampled, when emotions are raw, trust absent, and the taste of revenge sweet, traditional hard-nosed litigation might be the cleanest approach.

If cheerleader Ross Foote is busy telling one and all (including judges) that divorce is about “families in transition and shouldn’t be litigated in courts,” Macfarlane is more measured. Just the same, after three years of studying collaborative practice, and closely following sixteen cases in particular, she calls it “the most significant development in family law in decades” and is sanguine about its future.

While yoga was on offer and some of the conference workshops had New Age, crystal-ball-gazing titles, one essential principle underpins the growth of “the movement”: in divorce and child-custody matters, a future-oriented, interest- based approach makes sense; a backward-looking, rights-based approach does not.

Collaborative law’s founder, Stu Webb, and its proselytizer, Ross Foote, hail from Minnesota and Louisiana, respectively. Both argued that with Bush trying to reunite families along faith-based lines, the mainstream always looking askance at new-fangled experiments, and, in these times, promoters of non-adversarial peacekeeping open to charges of being woolly headed idealists, the movement must remain grounded.

Next year, the conference is scheduled for Atlanta, Georgia, the heartland of family values. Could be interesting.