Earlier this month, it was announced that Guhan Subramanian will succeed Bob Mnookin as chair of the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School. This is excellent news. More here, including these words from HLS Dean Manning: “Harvard Law School and the entire negotiation community are fortunate indeed to see this torch passed from one … Continue reading Changes at PON →

Check out the contribution of Brian Farkas (Cardozo) over at Prawfsblawg, as part of their online symposium on the future of legal education. Brian calls for greater adoption of mediation and arbitration in doctrinal courses, to better prepare students for the realities of legal practice. It’s a terrific post.

From New York, an interesting institutional approach to small-stakes dispute resolution: the Office of Administrative Trials and Hearings (OATH). According to the article, OATH was created in 1979 as an “independent alternative” to internal agency tribunals. Over the years, OATH has slowly gained jurisdiction over a wide variety of cases, many of which are community/neighborhood-level … Continue reading Tales from the City →

Gregory Parks (Wake Forest) has published “Race, Cognitive Bias, and the Power of Law Student Teaching Evaluations,” available here. It is a fascinating article, and it made me wonder whether there has ever been an article on student evaluations of ADR professors/courses. I am under the impression that ADR professors/courses receive higher-than-average evaluations; is that … Continue reading Parks on Race, Bias, and Student Evaluations →

Peter Joy (Washington University School of Law) has published “The Uneasy History of Experiential Education in U.S. Law Schools,” forthcoming in the Dickinson Law Review and available here. The abstract: This article explores the history of legal education, particularly the rise of experiential learning and its importance. In the early years of legal education in … Continue reading Joy on the History of Experiential Education →

Interesting op-ed from the New York Times on the recent student protest during a talk by Christina Hoff Sommers at Lewis & Clark Law School. As the author points out, the current political moment is fraught and toxic, which can make people “jumpy” when it comes to certain topics. Extreme rhetoric begets more extreme rhetoric, … Continue reading Do We Intervene? How? →

David Brooks has an interesting op-ed in today’s NYT about Better Angels, a 2016 “bipartisan citizen’s movement” seeking to bridge Red-Blue divides through more skillful, thoughtful dialogue. He argues that we will not make progress on the debate over gun violence without more respectful discourse and an honest desire to understand the competing views and … Continue reading Better Angels and Guns →

Kristen Roupenian’s new short story, “Cat Person,” is a fascinating story of relationship that manages to capture (among other things) the complexities of consent. Why we agree to what we agree to is such a fraught and often overdetermined question — it is not as simple as arming ourselves with the facts and making a … Continue reading Cat Person and Consent →

This time from Bud Light. Watch the video of the town crier reading the letter, which asks a Minnesota brewery to cease and desist using Bud Light’s trademarked “Dilly Dilly” in the name of brewery’s newly released “Dilly Dilly Mosaic Double IPA.” (If that link doesn’t work, try this one.) The transcript of the letter: … Continue reading Another Creative Cease-and-Desist →

On October 27, HLS hosted a series of panels as part of its bicentennial celebration. I was fortunate to serve as a panelist on Negotiation for Lawyers: A Bird’s Eye View of Negotiation and Dispute Resolution, along with Mark Iwry, David Hoffman, Sheila Heen, and Bob Mnookin. We modeled our panel after the NPR program, … Continue reading ADR Stories at Harvard Bicentennial →