I am delighted to post the following announcement from Bob Mnookin.  Bob will be hosting this year’s Works-in-Progress conference at Harvard.  Our first two conferences have been informative, helpful and lots of fun.  I am sure that pattern will continue!   Dear Colleague,   I’m pleased to announce that this fall the Program on Negotiation at … Continue reading Third Annual Dispute Resolution Works-In-Progress Conference at Harvard this fall–Call for Papers →

This is a posting courtesy of Lisa Bingham–thanks for sending it along! Last week, I was on a conference call with senior White House officials in the Office of Science and Technology Policy (Beth Noveck, Deputy Chief Technology Officer for Open Government, and Greg Nelson, Associate Director White House Office of Public Engagement). I write to share … Continue reading Obama Open Government Initiative →

Russ Bleemer at CPR just sent me a very interesting link regarding Judge and Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor’s arbitration jurisprudence. I’d taken a brief look at this myself and concluded that she seems to follow the general philosophy that enforcing arbitration agreements and awards is part of the national federal policy favoring arbitration. I … Continue reading Sotomayor’s Arbitration Jurisprudence →

No formal announcement from Vanderbilt yet, but Brian Leiter posted the news earlier today, and Chris confirmed it to me in an email this evening. Vanderbilt is a lucky, lucky school.  I look forward to watching the law school under Chris’s leadership. Michael Moffitt

A propos of several recent postings on this blog about the Arbitration Fairness Act, Professor David S. Schwartz (U. Wisconsin) recently posted on SSRN an article entitled “Mandatory Arbitration and Fairness,” forthcoming in the Notre Dame Law Review.  Here is the abstract: Until recently, it was understood that mandatory arbitration was a “do-it-yourself tort reform”: … Continue reading Mandatory Arbitration and Fairness →

Earlier this month the first drug court in the USA, in Dade County Florida, marked its 20th birthday. Many newspapers observed the anniversary and published what are now fairly commonplace stories about successful participants—along with a new twist of possible drug court closures due to tough economic times. At this point one third of all … Continue reading Happy Therapeutic Birthday: The First Drug Court Turns 20 →

In the Spring 2009 issue of Conflict Resolution Quarterly appears an article by Charkoudian, de Ritis, Buck and Wilson entitled, Mediation by Any Other Name Would Smell as Sweet, or Would It?  The Struggle to Define Approaches to Mediation.  (Vol. 23 Issue 3, p.293.) The authors conducted two studies reasonably contemporaneously, and report them together. … Continue reading More in the quest to define elusive mediator approaches/styles →

I’d like to take this time to remind our law professor readers, who are furiously grading papers like I am, to keep the Boskey Essay competition in mind as you read your students’ papers.  If you see a paper that stands out, encourage the student to submit it into the competition.   The essay may … Continue reading Reminder – Boskey Essay Competition →

On May 5, I reported on this blog about the Arbitration Fairness Act of 2009, now introduced into both the Senate and the House to amend the Federal Arbitration Act to invalidate pre-dispute arbitration clauses in consumer services, franchise and employment agreements.  As currently drafted, it is unclear whether the proposed Act would cover PDAAs … Continue reading Securities Arbitration and the Arbitration Fairness Act →

Since many of this blog’s readers are students I want to take a moment to congratulate you on your graduation from law school.  I recognize that the downturn in the economy has had a dramatic affect on many of your post graduation employment plans, and nobody signed up for graduating with a heavy debt with … Continue reading Congratulations Graduates !! →