From GFOI Debra Berman: As you begin to prepare your syllabus for next semester, please consider incorporating our Inter School Negotiation Practicum. Last year, I organized a nationwide “Inter-School Negotiation Practicum” that included 623 students from 23 law schools. And we are gearing up to offer it again this fall. If you choose to involve … Continue reading Inter-School Negotiation Practicum in the Fall
Now as an annual tradition, here’s a reminder of some of my favorite things you might require or recommend that students read as you gear up for the new year. 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 … Continue reading Readings and Resources for Teaching
From TGFOI Sharon Press and Bobbi McAdoo: Dear Colleagues, It is with great pleasure that Bobbi and I (finally) post the 2019 Legal Resources Share. The document has gotten so large and chock-filled with great ideas that we added this year, we split it into 2 documents: one containing the ideas and … Continue reading Another Year’s Wonderful Resource Share
Faculty using Stone Soup assignments have required students to write papers summarizing interviews or observations of actual cases. Like the assignments themselves, these papers vary quite a bit, as illustrated below. This post provides sample papers to give faculty ideas about what you might assign your classes in the future and provide papers you might … Continue reading Stone Soup: Student Papers From Gely’s Negotiation, Simcox’s Trust & Estates, and Dauber’s Evidence Courses
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
It would be hard to be more enthusiastic about Stone Soup than Carolyn Wilkes (Carrie) Kaas, the Co-Director of Quinnipiac’s Center on Dispute Resolution, Director of Experiential Education, as well as Director of Concentration Programs in Family Law and Civil Advocacy and Dispute Resolution. These days, she also teaches Quinnipiac’s Externship Program. Like a number … Continue reading Stone Soup Assessment: Carrie Kaas’s Externship Course
This post describes how Stone Soup pioneers used four different approaches in their mediation courses. Once again, it demonstrates colleagues’ creativity and the great potential for Stone Soup. Charlie Irvine had 20 LLM / MSc students and he assigned them to interview a mediator about a recent case. Students were required to write papers of … Continue reading Stone Soup Assessment: A Tale of Four Mediation Courses, by Charlie Irvine, Jim Levin, Martha Simmons, and Doug Yarn
I am extremely fortunate that Rafael Gely, the director of Missouri’s Center for the Study of Dispute Resolution, has been my partner in developing the Stone Soup Project. A year ago, when I first emailed him about it, the subject line was “a crazy idea?” Rafael’s immediate response was, “I love this idea! (Of course … Continue reading Stone Soup Assessment: Rafael Gely’s Negotiation Course
Much legal education in the US is like telling someone how to ride a bike or having them read an instruction manual. It’s important, but most people wouldn’t get very far if that’s all you did. You could simply give them a bike and tell them to go, but that could lead to some sudden … Continue reading Stone Soup Assessment: Bob Dauber’s Evidence Course
In June, Rafael Gely and I, the co-directors of the Stone Soup Project, decided to shift our approach from our original plan of a centralized database to a decentralized set of experimental efforts to produce knowledge about actual practice – aka letting a thousand chefs cook. I recently talked with many of the faculty who have … Continue reading Stone Soup: A Thousand Great Chefs
We all say that preparation is important – it’s more popular than mom and apple pie – but we have only vague ideas about how people actually consider possible alternatives. This includes the negotiators themselves. We sometimes list general factors or approaches, but usually that’s as far as we get. I will go out on … Continue reading Stone Soup: Learning How People Actually Prepare for Negotiation and Mediation
Stacey-Rae Simcox (Stetson) is using a Stone Soup assignment in her trusts and estates course. The extra-credit assignment is for students to interview someone who has been involved in a significant estate settlement. It adapts the Stone Soup model assignment by suggesting a very useful list of questions about things one might ask about the … Continue reading Stone Soup Assignment: Stacey-Rae Simcox’s Trusts and Estates Course