John Oliver recently devoted time on Last Week Tonight to looking at US prosecutors. Oliver discussed plea bargaining, the pressure put on defendants to accept plea deals, and prosecutorial hard bargaining tactics. There is nothing new here, but it is a nicely done piece (especially if you don’t mind the F-word being used liberally). If … Continue reading Prosecutors, power, and humor…
The Stone Soup Project developed an extensive set of materials for faculty to help their students get a better understanding of the real world of practice. This post collects links to these materials in one place so that faculty can easily include a Stone Soup assignment in a wide range of courses. Although these materials … Continue reading Collected Stone Soup Resources
Announcement yesterday from Harvard Law School that Rachel Viscomi has been appointed as an assistant clinical professor of law. She will also direct Harvard’s Negotiation and Mediation Clinical Program. Full press release at (https://today.law.harvard.edu/rachel-viscomi-named-assistant-clinical-professor-law/). Rachel’s energy is hard to capture in a blog post, but I suspect that anyone reading this doesn’t need for me … Continue reading Rachel Viscomi, Harvard Assistant Clinical Professor
The trial of Paul Manafort, which is scheduled to begin tomorrow, is a good illustration of an important value of trials. A decade ago, there was a flurry of academic activity following the publication of Prof. Marc Galanter’s detailed 2004 study entitled, The Vanishing Trial: An Examination of Trials and Related Matters in Federal and State … Continue reading In Praise of a Trial
As you gear up for the new year, here’s a reminder of some of my favorite things you might require or recommend that students read. My short “Letter to Kelly” provides advice for new 1Ls. If you teach a 1L course, you might assign it even though it doesn’t focus on any particular 1L subject. … Continue reading Readings and Resources for Teaching
Ben Trachtenberg, one of the sharpest faculty at my school, wrote this outstanding article analyzing what went wrong during the highly-publicized controversies at the University of Missouri in 2015. Having lived through this painful conflict, Ben’s account seems extremely accurate – and brings up a lot of sad memories for me, reminding me of things … Continue reading A Case Study of Murphy’s Law in Missouri
Michaela Keet and Heather Heavin (Saskatchewan), have been studying “litigation interest and risk assessment” (LIRA), something you probably teach using different names. You probably emphasize the importance of analyzing BATNAs and preparing for negotiation and mediation, which are basic elements of LIRA. Building on their own and others’ research, they developed a simple but comprehensive … Continue reading Keet and Heavin on Why Litigation Interest and Risk Assessment is So Darn Important for Lawyers and Mediators – And How You Can Make Stone Soup With It
In my 2015 article, Justice Scalia’s Hat Trick and the Supreme Court’s Flawed Understanding of Twenty-First Century Arbitration, I pointed out a factual mistake in the majority opinion in American Express v. Italian Colors, 133 S. Ct. 2304 (2013). In that opinion, Justice Scalia wrote: A pair of our cases brings home the point [that a class … Continue reading An Epic (and Compounded) Mistake in Epic Systems
The Stone Soup Project is about learning how things actually work in practice. Exposing students to the real world of practice through interviews or observations of actual cases can help them make sense of legal doctrine. Although we have started using Stone Soup in traditional ADR courses, the same techniques can work in a wide … Continue reading Stone Soup in 2L and 3L Courses
Many colleagues see an obvious benefit from using Stone Soup assignments in traditional dispute resolution courses but have doubts about using them in other courses, especially 1L courses. At the ABA Legal Educators’ Colloquium, some people worried that using Stone Soup in 1L courses would overwhelm students. That shouldn’t necessarily be the case, especially if … Continue reading Stone Soup in 1L Courses
