The Garibaldi Inn is the only Inn of Court devoted exclusively to the advancement of alternate dispute resolution (ADR). Our Inn schedules its regular meetings on the second Thursday of every month between September and May. All our meetings are held at The Basking Ridge Country Club in Basking Ridge, NJ, a beautiful meeting and venue space centrally located within easy access to major highways. To promote collegiality, we meet for a short cocktail period before we congregate at tables. Members and guests have an opportunity to visit while they eat their meal, which is followed by our educational programs. In December, we hold a holiday party to which spouses and significant others are invited and welcomed.
Our Inn is comprised of seasoned neutrals and advocates. We have an excellent balance of retired members of the Judiciary, practicing attorneys who appreciate the value of ADR, and attorneys who are full-time neutrals. In addition, we welcome participation from academics. Many of our members are adjunct professors of law at numerous universities. Richard K. Jeydel, one of our founding Inn members and a luminary in the field, died several years ago. We established an annual award (the Jeydel Award) in his memory to acknowledge a member who made significant contributions to ADR in New Jersey.
The Garibaldi Inn provides sophisticated programming in a collegial atmosphere. While networking with colleagues and leaders in the field, members learn cutting-edge information and participate in ethics discussions, debating some of the controversial topics we encounter. We do not function as a traditional Inn with Teams or Barristers; instead, we try to provide the best, balanced programming for an aspiring and advanced and demanding group. Mediation, arbitration, and negotiation topics are provided. The format is deliberately varied. We have individual speakers or panels that include dynamic question and answer periods. There are interactive group participation programs, as well as learning scenarios using role-plays. We invite a mix of authors, academics, and leading practitioners in the field, and we encourage our own members to share their expertise. Some programs are technique-based, while others deal with specific substantive areas of the law. A Programming Committee does the planning.
The group communicates regularly by e-mail and conference calls. During the spring and summer, we hold comprehensive planning sessions that critically evaluates past programming and plans for the future. New members are often asked to join the officers and trustees in the planning function. This assures a continual influx of new ideas and fresh perspectives in program assessment. In an attempt to foster increased participation by members, we have recently established several new committees including Membership, Outreach/Academy, and Garibaldi Scholarship.
Our goal is to present unusual high-level programs that exceed the norms for continuing legal education and engage seasoned neutrals and advocates in challenging professional and ethical developments and problems.