Systemic Constellations
Systemic Law (Law using Systemic Constellations)
Systemic Law applies the method of Family Constellations — a therapeutic process developed by German psychotherapist Bert Hellinger — to legal conflicts. In a constellation, participants (or stand-ins) physically represent the people involved in a conflict and their positions relative to one another, often surfacing hidden dynamics, loyalties, and unspoken burdens that are driving the dispute but that never show up in the legal pleadings.
Origins in Brazil
The term “Direito Sistêmico” (Systemic Law) was coined by Sami Storch, a judge in Amargosa, in the Brazilian state of Bahia, who began using constellations as a preliminary step before family-law hearings around 2006 — one of the poorest, most overloaded court districts in Brazil, where he had few staff and little support. He reports settlement rates approaching 100 percent in cases where the parties took part in a constellation first, and in 2014 received Brazil’s National Council of Justice “Conciliar é Legal” award for the project. The practice has since spread to other Brazilian courts and to legal systems in several other countries.
A Broader Perspective
Where Restorative Justice focuses on repairing harm between the specific people involved in a conflict, Systemic Law widens the lens further still, looking at the whole system — family, ancestry, organizational history — that a dispute sits inside, on the theory that conflicts often persist because of an imbalance somewhere in that larger system.
Many integrative law practitioners have become practitioners of systemic constellations work in diverse areas, from interpersonal conflict to systemic divisiveness.
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This page was researched and designed by Siannah Martius