I was going to post the piece below riffing on Arthur C. Brooks’s column about de-polarizing political biases. And then came the Democratic presidential debates this week, which provided a glaring example of how political biases often are generated and spread. This post uses these debates as an illustration of the process and then discusses … Continue reading Political De-Biasing
Have you seen the classic movie, Gaslight? It’s the story of a husband who slowly manipulates his wife into believing that she is insane because she imagines things, which are real, such as a gaslight flickering. This is the film noir version of the Marx Brothers quip, “Who you gonna believe, me or your lying … Continue reading Un-Gaslighting
The New York Times “smarter living” column has an interesting piece about letting go of grudges and forgiving others. It cites research about the benefits of doing so. A 2006 study, published in the Journal of Clinical Psychology as part of the Stanford Forgiveness Project, suggested that “skills-based forgiveness training may prove effective in reducing … Continue reading Letting Go and Forgiving
You are going to die. Before then, you may endure extended periods of suffering from illnesses and injuries (especially from falling down), grisly side effects from medical treatments, chronic physical and mental deterioration, disconnection from your earlier life, loss of control, family conflict, and entanglement with the medical and insurance industries. Some of that misery … Continue reading Helping People Make Hard Decisions – And Making Them Ourselves
Michelle Obama’s fabulous memoir, Becoming, has valuable lessons for us in legal education and practice. This post first summarizes the book and then describes some of these lessons. The book is a chronological narrative of Ms. Obama’s life, which is fascinating in itself, though I was particularly interested in her portrayals of the worlds she … Continue reading Becoming Ourselves
Universities generally ignored serious allegations of sexual assault until very recently. Did the Obama Administration policy go too far to correct this problem? That’s the view of Prof. Lara Bazelon, director of the criminal juvenile justice and the racial justice clinics at the University of San Francisco School of Law, who wrote a NYT op-ed, … Continue reading Designing a Fair Dispute System for Title IX Cases
The New York Times published an interesting article worth reading, which riffs on Mark Zuckerberg’s statement that Facebook would develop an independent body to make decisions about acceptability of posts on its platform. He mused that the body might be like a supreme court to make final decisions reflecting global social norms. The article was … Continue reading Dispute System Design for Facebook
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?
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
You probably know – or at least know of – Forrest (Woody) Mosten. He is the award-winning mediator, lawyer, and peacemaker who is called the “father of unbundling,” referring to the process of offering legal clients discrete services as distinct from a complete bundled representation, as lawyers traditionally provide. He also is a prominent collaborative … Continue reading Mosten and Cordover’s New Collaborative Law Book
