From Debra Gerardi: “Wholeness is not a place you can get to. Wholeness is a kind of attitude or approach to the whole of life. It’s a way.” David Bohm The University of California Hastings College of the Law held a two-day symposium last month entitled, The Integrated Lawyer: A Symposium on Well-Being and the … Continue reading Notes from Hastings’s Symposium on The Integrated Lawyer
Donna Shestowsky (California-Davis) recently wrote the latest in a series of her studies asking actual litigants about their procedural preferences. The article is Inside the Mind of the Client: An Analysis of Litigants’ Decision Criteria for Choosing Procedures, 36 Conflict Resolution Quarterly 69 (2018). Here’s the abstract: This article presents findings from the first longitudinal … Continue reading What Do Litigants Really Want?
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
I had the good fortune to be one of Marc Galanter’s students when I was in graduate school. As one of his former students, I was invited to contribute to a symposium honoring his work and I wrote this appreciation of his scholarship. I suspect that many of us in the dispute resolution community aren’t … Continue reading For Pragmatic Romanticism
Some questions for law professors: Why did you go to law school? Why did you decide to go into academia? What do you want to accomplish in your work? What do you hope for your students? In this post, I give my answers to these questions, which I think will resonate for many readers of … Continue reading Stone Soup, Reflective Practice, Action Research, and Social Justice
The ABA Section of Dispute Resolution Task Force on Research on Mediator Techniques recently released an excellent report really worth reading. It should be of value to anyone interested in mediation. It also provides useful lessons about what we can learn about ADR from empirical research. Superstar ADR empirical researcher Roselle Wissler is the principal … Continue reading Lessons From the ABA’s Excellent Report on Mediator Techniques
You have certainly heard many lawyer jokes, some of which are pretty funny. But have you ever thought of them as data for a scientific study? Marc Galanter did. He’s a Wisconsin law professor and giant in our DR field. In a recent post in this Stone Soup mini-course, I summarized some cool qualitative studies. … Continue reading Stone Soup Mini-Course: Galanter’s Use of Lawyer Jokes as Data
I generally prefer not to tell people what to do. So perhaps I should reframe the title of this post to “If You Don’t Read Noam’s Masterpiece Right This Minute, You Will Hate Yourself Forever.” I refer to Noam Ebner’s article, Negotiation is Changing, which is part of the Tower of Babel symposium. He has … Continue reading Drop Everything and Read Noam’s Masterpiece Right Now
From GFOI Hal Abramson: Dear Friends and Colleagues: This past weekend the Board of Governors selected International Academy of Mediators (IAM)’s new Scholars in Residence (SIR) in light of the fact that our current wonderful scholar, Hal Abramson, is at the end of his tenure with us. Thanks to Hal we have established a durable … Continue reading To SIRs (Lela Love and Dwight Golann) With Love
This has been a dramatic week to say the least. Very few people expected the outcome of the presidential election. The country is starkly divided with one major candidate receiving more electoral votes while the other major candidate received more popular votes. Although the two candidates received a similar number of popular votes, the exit … Continue reading How Can We Build Common Ground Between Bubbles? – Part 1
