E.O. Wilson is a Harvard biologist, two-time Pulitzer Prize winning author, and the world’s leading authority on ants. As this article explains, he believes that human civilizations and ant civilizations have much in common. In some respects, that’s encouraging. Ant civilizations are communitarian in some very positive ways. For example, ants who have had enough … Continue reading On Ants, Humans, and the Challenge of Conflict Resolution
This past weekend, the Hugh L. Carey Center for Dispute Resolution at St. John’s and the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) hosted the second annual Securities Dispute Resolution Triathlon at St. John’s Manhattan campus. The Triathlon combines negotiation, mediation, and arbitration in one competition, as students play the roles of parties and attorneys in a … Continue reading Winners of 2010 Dispute Resolution Triathlon
With the first Monday in October nearly upon us, it will be interesting to see how Justice Sotomayor votes in the Supreme Court’s upcoming arbitration cases, especially the controversial AT & T v. Concepcion. Sotomayor did not participate in Stolt-Nielsen, which produced a 5-3 majority with Ginsburg, Breyer, and the now-retired Justice Stevens in the … Continue reading Sotomayor on Arbitration
Today’s New York Times includes an article discussing—in less than glowing terms—Nevada’s foreclosure mediation program. The article suggests that the program is slanted toward lenders, because it seems to help relatively few homeowners reach permanent modifications allowing them to retain their houses. I’m not an expert on foreclosure mediation—Andrea and others who run those programs … Continue reading NY Times Skeptical of Foreclosure Mediation
The changing (declining?) fortunes of lawyers have been much in the news recently, with the anxiety caused by a contracting domestic job market exacerbated by reports of increased legal outsourcing. In an attempt to peek over the horizon, my dean asked me to read Richard Susskind’s The End of Lawyers? Rethinking the Nature of Legal … Continue reading “The End of Lawyers?”
Creating a split with the Third and Eleventh Circuits, the Ninth Circuit has held that a mandatory arbitration clause in a credit card agreement is unenforceable under the Credit Repair Organizations Act. The case, Greenwood v. CompuCredit Corp., was a class action stemming from a credit card marketed to consumers with weak credit as a … Continue reading Circuit Split on Credit Card Arbitration
I co-taught an Intensive Negotiation course last week (an exhausting 28 credits in one week), and I wanted to do an exercise demonstrating value creation to help dispel the fixed-pie bias. In my smaller, regular negotiation classes, I typically do a Snack Exchange exercise modified from the version created by Jay Folberg. But I didn’t … Continue reading Value Creation Exercise
Herbert Kritzer has posted The Antecedents of Disputes: Complaining and Claiming on SSRN. The article is a compendium of empirical research into the “naming, blaming, and claiming” process that leads to disputes. (See Felstiner, Abel, and Sarat, The Emergence of Disputes: Naming, Blaming, Claiming . . .) It goes much deeper than the usual disputing … Continue reading Kritzer on Complaining & Claiming
Harvard’s Laurence Tribe is currently serving as a senior counselor in the Justice Department on access to justice. Last week he addressed the nation’s state chief justices at their annual conference, where he gave an impassioned plea to reform “a system in which the deck is stacked in favor of those who already have the … Continue reading Tribe on Private Dispute Resolution and Access to Justice
Last week I posted about a grant from the Obama Administration to support “judge-directed negotiations” in medical practice litigation in New York. The purpose of the grant was to build on the success of Judge Douglas McKeon, who has been using mediation techniques in med-mal cases involving NYC hospitals. Jeff Thompson at ADRHub has now … Continue reading Humanness in Med-Mal (Continued)
