For the first time since 2004, this fall, I will not teach our required 1L course, Lawyering: Problem-Solving and Dispute Resolution. We had several sections each year and so I had a chance to impart my views about lawyering to a substantial part of our class. I felt passionate about the value of good lawyering … Continue reading My Last Lecture in Your Course
Have you seen “Inside Out” yet? It’s the delightful Pixar movie portraying the conflicting emotions of an 11 year-old girl grappling with the difficulties of a move from Minnesota to San Francisco. Indeed, the emotions are characters themselves: Anger, Disgust, Fear, Sadness, and Joy. The film’s producers consulted psychologists who wrote a piece in the … Continue reading Damn Emotions!
This post stimulated a conversation with Peter Benner about planned early dispute resolution (PEDR), beginning with the exchange of comments below. There are six additional posts in this conversation. At the end of each post, there is a link to the next post in the conversation. _______________________________________________________________ Early mediation is a waste of time. This … Continue reading Planning is Critically Important for Early Dispute Resolution
I can’t resist commenting on Andrea’s lighthearted post showing a sign at a Starbuck’s with President John F. Kennedy’s famous statement, “Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate!” This reminds me of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s statement, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” I … Continue reading Fear and Negotiation
If you are sick and tired of hearing me sing the praises of multi-stage simulations (MSS) and don’t want to see any data about it, read no further. Some Background Before I start singing, let me provide some background. I started using MSSs when I began teaching negotiation several years ago. Related to my research … Continue reading Great Value of Students Playing Clients in Multi-Stage Simulations
BARBRI’s “State of the Legal Field Survey” reports that “71 percent of 3L law students believe they possess sufficient practice skills. In contrast, only 23 percent of practicing attorneys who work at companies that hire recent law school graduates believe recent law school graduates possess sufficient practice skills.” This finding is puzzling and astounding. It … Continue reading Illusions of Competence
I was surprised to read an article in the New York Times indicating that the system of using bar exams to license lawyers “is facing a new round of scrutiny — not just from the test takers but from law school deans and some state legal establishments.” The article quotes Kristin Booth Glen, former dean … Continue reading Erosion of Support for Bar Exam System
I just read a provocative article entitled, “Litigation as Violence,” by Vincent Cardi (West Virginia), 49 Wake Forest L. Rev. 677 (2014). You may want to assign this nine-page article (and/or this post) in your classes, which may stimulate valuable discussion about the consequences of lawyers’ work for their clients – and themselves. Professor Cardi … Continue reading Litigation as Violence
In a series of posts, I described significant problems with the traditional negotiation paradigm of two coherent models, positional and interest-based negotiation (or other labels for essentially the same models). This paradigm has been helpful in moving us forward in recent decades. But simply saying that something was a interest-based or positional negotiation not only … Continue reading How Can You Get a Piece of the Action?
SSRN subscribers will soon see a passel of my old articles scrolling across their screens and may wonder, “What the heck?” The heck is that, thanks to a new scanner, I was able to make nice pdf files of some articles I wrote before I started posting pieces on SSRN. With the benefit of hindsight, … Continue reading Oldies But Goodies