From my colleague, Amy Schmitz, forwarding (with permission) information about how courts are responding to the crisis: Paul Embley with the National Center for State Courts put together this nice synopsis on some things happening here in the U.S. with respect to courts moving online. It is amazing how individuals have had to work together … Continue reading Moving US Courts Online
At the Past-and-Future Conference last month, I was on a program with Doug Frenkel, Michaela Keet, and Donna Stienstra entitled, “Research and Scholarship with a Real-World Focus: Studying What Practitioners Actually Do.” This program followed one on research terminology and methodology, described in this post. This program was in a conversational format, framed around several … Continue reading Studying What DR Practitioners Actually Do
I liked virtually all of the sessions I attended at this year’s ABA conference and I especially appreciated the Court ADR Conference keynote address, delivered by Michael Buenger, the executive vice-president and chief operating officer of the National Center for State Courts. He kindly agreed to let me post his provocative, wide-ranging talk, which I … Continue reading Michael Buenger’s Great Keynote Address at the ABA Court ADR Conference
Over the past year, we have witnessed growing evidence of the massive failures of our legal system to deal properly with a rampant system in which powerful men sexually dominate others, especially women. This post describes the nature, magnitude, and consequences of a long-term history of criminal and civil sexual offenses in the US and … Continue reading How Can We Fix Legal System Failures to Properly Handle Sexual Offenses?
The Negotiation and Conflict Resolution (NCR) Program in the Creighton University Graduate School is excited to invite you to Disrupting Law, Reclaiming Justice – an upcoming event at Creighton that brings to the Heartland a national conversation about the need to remake the legal system – for it to be more responsive to more people, … Continue reading Creighton Program on Disrupting Law and Reclaiming Justice on October 8
I recently joined the ABA Section of Dispute Resolution’s Publications Board, which recruits people to write books, reviews book proposals, and oversees the Section’s bookselling operation. If you might want to write a book for the Section, you can contact Pub Board chair Rebecca Price and/or vice-chair Andy Little. I came to appreciate the importance … Continue reading The New Handshake: Using ODR to Create Value for Consumers and Businesses
“[I]f . . . I act for the Big Bad Wolf against Little Red Riding Hood and I don’t want this dispute resolved, I want to tie it up as long as I possibly can, and mandatory mediation is custom made. I can waste more time, I can string it along, I can make sure … Continue reading A Good Bad-Faith Policy?
Recently, I did a post about a new book that Forrest (“Woody”) Mosten co-authored about unbundled legal services. Woody just sent me a link to a podcast conversation he had with our friend, Dr. Julie Macfarlane, the director of the National Self-Represented Litigants Project (NSRLP). In this podcast, entitled “Back to the Future of Legal … Continue reading Conversation Between Julie Macfarlane and Woody Mosten about Unbundling and Self-Represented Litigants
Gemma Smyth is the Externship Program Director for the University of Windsor Faculty of Law, in Canada, which has a long tradition of focusing on access to justice. Windsor is so committed to this mission that it requires all students to take an Access to Justice course in their first semester. Gemma is one of … Continue reading Stone Soup Assessment: Gemma Smyth’s Access to Justice Course
TPKATVT is back. It actually hadn’t gone away, though I hadn’t seen signs of it for a while. TPKATVT, aka The Phenomenon Known as the Vanishing Trial, got started by a 2004 report written by Professor Marc Galanter, The Vanishing Trial: An Examination of Trials and Related Matters in Federal and State Courts. Each year … Continue reading TPKATVT
The presidential election campaign this year has provided several teachable moments for law students and lawyers and this post focuses on one of them. Unless you have been hibernating for the past few weeks, you know that a number of women have accused Republican candidate Donald J. Trump of sexual misconduct. Mr. Trump and his … Continue reading Why Don’t People Complain? Implications for Defense Counsel. And Some Practical Ethics Hypos for Students.
We have such an incredible group of people in our community doing wonderful work in so many different areas. Forty years ago, at the 1976 Pound Conference, Frank Sander proposed the multi-door courthouse. Before then, mediation and arbitration had been widely used in the labor context for decades but there wasn’t much else going on … Continue reading Global Pound Conference, Papal Encyclical on the Environment, and Cyberweek