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
I 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. I came to appreciate the importance of selling the Section’s books, both as a way to help finance the Section and to disseminate our ideas. As part of that effort, … Continue reading The New Handshake: Using ODR to Create Value for Consumers and Businesses
One of the reasons I feel so strongly about the value of the Stone Soup Project is that it inspires us to develop deeper understandings about how conflicts unfold. I have encouraged colleagues to assign students to get detailed accounts of cases from the outset – not focus only on the tail end – because … Continue reading Conflict in Context
Grande Lum, former director of the Community Relations Service (CRS), just published an important article in The Hill newspaper urging Congress to maintain independent funding for the agency. “Historically, CRS has played a significant role in facilitating dialogue, developing constructive relationships, and reducing the possibility of violence. Its mediators and conciliators played a key role … Continue reading Grande Lum’s Article Criticizing Proposal to Effectively Eliminate the Community Relations Service
A recent episode of the Modern Love podcast told the story of a man struggling to deal with conflicting desires of his mother and wife to cook him delicious meals. While having too much good food may not seem problematic, negotiating serially with one’s wife and mother sure can be. This account reveals subtle ways … Continue reading Culinary Negotiation
