Lela Love and Stawart Sterk recently published an article, Leaving More than Money: Mediation Clauses in Estate Planning Documents, 65 Wash. & Lee L. Rev. 539 (2008). The abstract of their article reads: When probate disputes arise, an increasing number of courts have been referring those disputes to mediation. Estate planners, however, have been less … Continue reading Mediation, Probate, and Estate Planning
I read recently that the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has voted to permit pilot projects aimed at developing alternative ways of processing EEO complaints. I have not read the details of the draft regulation. As I understand it, the principal motivation for the regulation is to encourage creativity and flexibility in the handling of these … Continue reading Alternatives to Alternatives: The EEOC’s Next Experiments
Len Riskin and Nancy Welsh recently posted a version of their article, “Is that All There is? The ‘Problem’ in Court-Oriented Mediation.” I gather from the taglines that it will be published in the George Mason Law Review later this year, and I look forward to seeing the final version. The question Len and Nancy … Continue reading What’s the Problem? (with the problems mediation tries to solve)
Alan Scott Rau recently posted his critique of the Supreme Court’s Hall Street Associates v. Mattel decision. Perhaps, though, to call the article, entitled “Fear of Freedom,” a “critique” is to understate the fervency of Rau’s views. It’s more like a well-organized, carefully-crafted rant. Using words like “deeply unsatisfactory,” “appall[ing],” “hesitant and muddy,” and “grotesque,” … Continue reading The Hall Street Decision – Professor Rau’s Rant
I just read the recently-posted, to-be-published-somewhere empirical study of the use of ADR in the federal government in the late 1990s. Entitled, Dispute Resolution and the Vanishing Trial: Comparing Federal Government Litigation and ADR Outcomes, the study’s authors include Lisa Bingham, Tina Nabatchi, Jeff Senger, and Michael Scott Jackman. Their abstract reads: This study compares … Continue reading ADR: The Federal Government’s Experience
John Gradwohl of the University of Nebraska is conducting research about “peer” arbitrations — which he defines as “situations where the parties themselves want to have a system in which their participants make a binding determination of a dispute rather than bring in a third party decider.” He recently posted a request for information on … Continue reading “Peer” Arbitration – Request for Information
I’m wondering if anyone can point me to a specific example of duress being used successfully as the basis for avoiding an arbitration agreement. I’ve seen plenty of examples of cases in which it has been argued unsuccessfully. And I’ve seen examples of cases in which it was one of a laundry list of grievances, … Continue reading Duress as a basis for avoiding an arbitration agreement?
Andrew Daughety and Jennifer Reinganum, two economists from Vanderbilt, recently posted an article on SSRN titled, simply, “Settlement.” I don’t know how it works in the economics literature. In many areas of the law, insanely short article titles are typically reserved either for those who are unspeakably preeminent or who are the first to a … Continue reading What Economists Say to Each Other about Settlement
If “conflict resolution” happened in a forest, and nobody was around to facilitate it, would it still be “conflict resolution”? In an article in the most recent Conflict Resolution Quarterly, Patricia Orr, Kirk Emerson, and Dale Keyes report on the development of an evaluation framework for conflict resolution practice in environmental and natural resource disputes. … Continue reading Defining Environmental “Conflict Resolution”
In one of her blog entries following the Supreme Court’s Hall Street v Mattel decision, Sarah Cole wondered whether the restrictive reading of FAA s10 and s11 left any space for “manifest disregard” and any other judicially-created grounds for arbitral review. Sarah concluded, I think correctly, that manifest disregard appears safe. And as she points … Continue reading Hall Street v. Mattel and “Public Policy”
