Platz C1, Popa T1
1RMIT University
Biography:
Dr Tina Popa is a Senior Lecturer in law at RMIT University. Tina’s research and teaching interests are in tort law, health law, psychiatric harm and alternative/appropriate dispute resolution. Tina researches legal issues in medical negligence compensation, no-fault compensation systems and psychiatric harm, as well as the role of non-adversarial approaches to justice in tort/health law. Tina’s PhD thesis explored the challenges in the litigation and mediation of medical negligence and mental harm claims in the post-Ipp era. Tina has recently completed a Graduate Diploma in Psychology, and has an emerging research interest in the intersect between law and psychology.
Personal injury and medical negligence claims frequently involve pursuit of compensation by individuals who have sustained devastating physical and/or psychiatric harm. Traditionally, doctrinal tort law principles play out in a court (or court-annexed) arena involving adversarial processes that have not been readily accommodating to the psychological, emotional and wellbeing needs of injured claimants. While adversarial litigation processes often fail to cater to individuals’ non-legal and emotional needs, appropriate/alternative dispute resolution (ADR) mechanisms were hailed for their capacity to compensate for the limitations of litigation by addressing emotions in dispute resolution. However, existing research shows that, like litigation, ADR mechanisms are unable to fully address the emotional needs of claimants in personal injury claims. This is due to a focus on legal rights, combined with lack of sufficient training for mediators to equip them with skills to manage emotions and promote healing in disputants. Recent policy initiatives have shifted the spotlight onto the significance of mental health in society, with growing recognition of the importance of emotion and psychological wellbeing in the legal sector. This is evident through scholarship on therapeutic jurisprudence and procedural justice, empirical research drawing on lived experiences of personal injury plaintiffs, and in the emerging field of ‘legal design’ which aims to create legal processes that better cater to human needs. The aim of this paper is to draw on extant literature and prior empirical studies to demonstrate that dispute resolution processes for tort claims involving personal injuries are an ideal site for empirically informed law reform to create processes that better align with disputants’ emotional, non-legal and non-financial needs. The authors contend that contemporary scholarship on law and wellbeing, and the emerging field of ‘legal design’, provide a timely avenue for reforming processes that consciously couple tort law and emotions.