The U.S. Supreme Court just granted certiorari in a third arbitration case for this term!! 14 Penn Plaza v. Pyett, — S.Ct. —-, 2008 WL 423540 (U.S.), 76 USLW 3255 (February 19, 2008). The Pyett case will address whether a union-negotiated waiver of employees’ rights to proceed in a judicial forum for federal statutory causes … Continue reading Supreme Court hears third arbitration case this term: 14 Penn Plaza v. Pyett
Jean Sternlight recently published an article entitled In Defense of Mandatory Binding Arbitration (If Imposed on the Company), 8 Nev. L. J. 82 (2007). She describes the project as one that she conceived initially as a “lark,” but what emerges is a truly fascinating thought exercise. Jean’s basic thesis is summarized in the excerpt below. … Continue reading Imposing Arbitration on the “Big Guys”
There are a batch of writings today in the papers and the blogosphere about how to maintain happy relationships and I thought it would be fun to connect to a few. First, there was a great post today by Dayana Yochim in The Motley Fool entitled How to Win Your Next Money Fight. Romantic poet William … Continue reading It’s Valentine’s Day–What are You Negotiating?
David White and Woody Mosten are soliciting nominations for the 2008 ABA Lawyer as Problem Solver Award and the Lawyer as Problem Solver Exercises. Each year, the Lawyer as Problem Solver Committee seeks to identify those colleagues who have distinguished themselves through a commitment to creative advocacy. Such individuals are a force for positive change through their dynamic representation of … Continue reading ABA Lawyer as Problem Solver Award Call for Nominations
Resolution Systems Institute, which used to be known as CAADRS, sent this announcement about their new website. It looks like a great new resource for research on court ADR: A NEW WEB SITE FOR A TRUSTED RESOURCE: INTRODUCING COURTADR.ORG Resolution Systems Institute, formerly the Center for Analysis of ADR Systems (CAADRS), announces the launch of … Continue reading CAADRS Becomes RSI; New ADR Resources Available
Today’s New York Times Editorial entitled “The Cult of Secrecy at the White House” includes reference both to ombudsmen and to mediation. I am neither an every-day reader of the NYT editorial page, nor is my long-term memory as reliable as I’d prefer. But I cannot recall either of these staples of modern dispute resolution appearing … Continue reading Today’s New York Times Editorial
Professors Theodore Eisenberg, Geoffrey Miller and Emily Sherwin investigated a number of Fortune 100 firms’ use of mandatory arbitration clauses. See Arbitration’s Summer Soldiers: An Empirical Study of Arbitration Clauses in Consumer and Nonconsumer Contracts (draft December 18, 2007). Their empirical analysis revealed that companies frequently use arbitration clauses in consumer contracts but do not … Continue reading Empirical Arbitration Analysis Reveals Companies Prefer Litigation
According to a traditional dynamic in a case with multiple defendants, a plaintiff makes a demand (or a new demand), and then each defendant has to decide how much to indicate it is willing to contribute to a settlement (with that calculation being based in part on the plaintiff’s demand and in part on the defendant’s … Continue reading Blind Negotiations
I was catching up on my taped Colbert Report shows over the weekend and saw a brilliant interview with Ambassador Andrew Young from earlier in January. It turns out that Andrew Young negotiated with Stephen Colbert’s father to settle a strike in South Carolina over 40 years ago. Black nurses at one of South Carolina’s … Continue reading Stephen Colbert, Ambassador Andrew Young, and How to Negotiate the End of the WGA Strike
There are many unforseen consequences of the writer’s strike, not the least of which is that my law students are watching American Gladiators. (Maybe they would do this anyway but I am clinging to the hope that, faced with choices, they would not.) When is the writer’s strike going to end? Is this strike, like the … Continue reading The Writer’s Guild Strike and American Gladiators
