"""There's nothing 'alternative' about legislation"": an enquiry into the influence of regulatory culture and legal consciousness on regulators' responses to ADR legislation"

Legislation regarding Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) can legitimize its use as an alternative to a more formal, law- or court-centred dispute resolution process. However, recent studies warn that prescribing and concretizing this alternative process in legislation may paradoxically undermine, limit or prevent its use. The combination of robust theoretical and empirical research and investigation described in this dissertation seeks to advance the debate about ADR legislation - whether and what to legislate and why. Current legal theories of regulatory culture, legal consciousness and administrative discretion are presented and analyzed. These, in turn, inform the design of a case study that seeks to confirm or challenge the theory, based on in-depth, issue-focused, phenomenological interviews with key informants in the Ontario health professions self-regulatory field regarding recent ADR legislation governing their complaints resolution process. The case study data reveal a variety of individual and collective perceptions of the power of legislation, legality, non-law and alternatives-to-law, as reflected in comments about the requirements and expectations of the ADR legislation in a politically dynamic and evolving professional self-regulatory context. The empirical evidence both supports and challenges the ADR regulatory theory and demonstrates how legitimate administrative discretionary power to interpret and adapt the law permits regulatory practices to align with, contest, resist or escape the power of law, thus accomplishing or frustrating the increased efficiency, transparency, accountability, and consistency the ADR law was intended to achieve.