Taming the Green-Eyed Monster: Jealousy's Role in Dispute Resolution and How Best to Tackle It

One of BBC Radio 4’s longest running and popular programmes was called Quote… Unquote. It ran for over 40 years, and its last broadcast was in December 2021. Devised and hosted by the erudite and urbane Nigel Rees, panellists from the arts, politics and entertainment worlds and elsewhere were asked to identify the origin of a particular quotation from a film, book, politics or current affairs. There were lots of digressions, and the people on the show were generally well-read and amusing.

In one programme, a panellist was asked to identify the source of the relatively well
known Shakespearian line: ‘O beware, my lord, of jealousy; it is the green-eyed monster 
which doth mock the meat it feeds on.’ That sparked a conversation about the Ten 
Commandments, which enabled another panellist to share the ‘unquote’ (or misquote) 
he’d heard from some schoolchildren who had been asked to name one of the commandments, prompting one child to come up proudly with the gem: ‘Thou shalt not omit adultery.’ 

The fact that jealousy features in the ten biblical injunctions at all—‘Thou shalt not 
covet’—is in some ways strange. The others tell you of things you should do, or not do. 
This one tells you how you should feel. That is odd because, in the main, we tend to think 
that we can regulate actions, but that we cannot stop ourselves feeling; or alternatively, 
we cannot make ourselves feel something we don’t really feel. That, by the way, is why I  struggle with New Year’s Eve hilarity—at the stroke of midnight: ‘Be happy!’

In many legal disputes, one side will feel that they have been ‘ripped off’ by 
the other. The other side has deliberately miscalculated the sum due, or twisted the  contract so as to have that result. Or they have ‘stolen’ land not properly within their  curtilage. Mediation helps to narrow the gap between the parties, until ultimately that gap is bridged.

Reverse jealousy

But one scenario is particularly intractable. What if the sentiment on one side is a kind of reverse jealousy? What if one side has been so badly rubbed up the wrong way that even after a figure of compensation has been reached which is in principle acceptable (or some other financial or proprietary package which effectively ticks all the boxes), but yet one box remains unticked? 

That box? ‘I want them to leave this mediation feeling as badly as they have made me feel.'

I, and I’m sure other mediators, have been in that situation, and the one I remember 
most had a particularly unfortunate dimension. That obstacle to the deal (a 
construction dispute) was thrown in just when (we thought) we were about to start 
drawing up the agreement, not by the party to the dispute—but by his lawyer! The  expression used was: ‘It’s a good deal all round, I can see that, but I still don’t think the other side is hurting enough.’

In some ways, in a bitter dispute, you can understand that sentiment—although it is a 
little unusual for a lawyer to feel the pain even more than the client. Ultimately, the case settled, though it took longer than had been expected, and only after the embittered side 
came to accept that there is no pleadable form of relief in the prayer at the end of a statement of claim, after the sum claimed or injunctive relief, and before the claim for interest, which reads: ‘The defendant shall forthwith feel as badly as the claimant has been made to feel, as a result of this dispute.’

In that case and others, the form of jealousy is not so much ‘I want what you 
have’, but rather ‘I don’t want you to have what you have’—in other words, I don’t want you to have complete peace of mind, because, for so long, you have deprived me of my own peace of mind.

Redirected passions 

That is a particularly nasty trick for the green-eyed monster to play—but mediation can see it off, perhaps in a more comfortable environment than a courtroom. Hardly a 
week passes without the media reporting a high-profile family or sibling dispute about a will or an inheritance. Often the parties concerned are not poor, but what drives the dispute is not the need for the funds or property in issue, but the need for the other party to not have it. 

Individuals or corporations with extremely deep pockets might allow themselves the indulgence of a lengthy and high-cost trial to vent those passions, but mostly, such litigation is scarring for those involved and also uneconomic. 

Mediation provides a medium for directing passions and depriving the green-eyed monster of its meat.

Who knows? Maybe I’ll be able to sing Auld Lang Syne with spontaneous jollity this year, if I put in the effort.  

This article was originally published in New Law Journal in November 2023.