Today’s big law school news is the merger of Hamline and William Mitchell Law Schools into the Mitchell/Hamline School of Law to be located on Mitchell’s St. Paul campus. This is of particular interest to us here because of Hamline’s strong ADR program with wonderful faculty who are good friends. In the true win-win nature of negotiation (sorry John for bringing up the old paradigm) this seems like one of those situations. Even though William Mitchell’s dean “acknowledged that combining the two schools will result in some cuts in faculty and staff,” the ADR faculty certainly are well positioned being an area of strength. Congratulations friends and good luck with the new school
For more information some links
Hat Tip – The Faculty Lounge
Thanks Art for sharing our great news. From the dispute resolution perspective, we see this merger as an incredible opportunity to build an even stronger program. Having been deeply involved with the merger of SPIDR, AFM and CRENet to create ACR, I know that there is a lot of work to do in order to integrate … and we are so excited to do this work with our wonderful Mitchell colleagues, Nancy Ver Steegh and Jim Hilbert (and a host of fabulous adjuncts). We hope to have lots more to share in the coming months.
Art,
Thanks for the post. This has been a long time coming (discussions off and on for two decades)…one of those wonderful examples of a great idea that everyone knows is the “right thing” to do but also knows it can’t be done. Well, it got done…by some really great lawyer negotiators! Kudos especially to the two deans (Jean Holloway at Hamline and Eric Janus at William Mitchell). Someday I hope to get permission to write up a negotiation case study. But for now, full steam ahead on the really fun part of a merger challenge – detailed integration planning and living the deal. Now that it’s public we can finally get students directly engaged as participants: hard to imagine that any simulation could ever provide as many negotiation (and I suspect mediation) opportunities as this real-time, adventure learning reality will do in the months ahead! I feel like I’ve been given a gift-wrapped, once-in-a lifetime opportunity as an ADR educator. I’m posting this in the hope that our entire community might do some creative thinking on how to help us best capture the teaching possibilities, both for our current students and for others in the future.
Best,
Jim