Black’s Law Dictionary definition of “smoking gun” could be Dominion Voting System’s brief supporting its motion for summary judgment against Fox “News.” Dominion’s argument is summed up in a Washington Post headline, “Fox News feared losing viewers by airing truth about election, documents show. ‘Everything at stake here,’ billionaire founder Rupert Murdoch wrote to a … Continue reading Fox’s Smoking Gun
Forrest (Woody) Mosten, Elizabeth Potter Scully, and Lara Traum’s book, Effectively Representing Clients in Family Mediation, was just published by the ABA. This is particularly valuable because many parties rely on lawyers to represent them in mediation, and there probably are many more lawyers who act as advocates in mediation than those who mediate. The … Continue reading New Book on Effectively Representing Clients in Family Mediation
Kris Franklin and Peter Phillips of New York Law School just wrote an excellent article that people who care about teaching dispute resolution in law schools should read: Pass the Salt: Problem Resolution Lawyering Across the 21st Century Law Curriculum. Here’s the abstract: Attorneys work with clients to resolve problems. Legal education can help prepare … Continue reading Problem Resolution Lawyering Across the 21st Century Law Curriculum
For a long time, Donna Shestowsky has conducted empirical studies of litigants’ perceptions about dispute resolution processes. CPR’s Alternatives to the High Cost of Litigation magazine just published an article summarizing her study about parties’ expectations about the process used to resolve their cases. The article is Why Client Expectations of Legal Procedures Must Be … Continue reading Shestowsky’s Study Supports Value of Lawyers’ Early Education of Clients About Their Procedural Options
Deborah Jones Merritt sent this notice of a virtual conference on bar exam reform that Mitchell Hamline, the University of Minnesota, and the University of St. Thomas are sponsoring on Friday, April 22, from 9:30-4:00 pm Central Time. The notice includes a link to register. Several states are now actively considering alternative pathways to licensure, … Continue reading Conference on Bar Exam Reform on April 22
The January 2022 issue of Dispute Resolution Magazine reports results of a survey of past contributors conducted by Editorial Board co-chairs Andrea Schneider and Michael Moffitt. This post uses some of the survey responses to suggest that we recognize the legal profession and judiciary as part of the dispute resolution field. “Alternative” No More In … Continue reading The Legal Profession, Judiciary, and Dispute Resolution
That’s the title of a thesis written by Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson when she was an undergraduate. A Washington Post profile, How Ketanji Brown Jackson Found a Path Between Confrontation And Compromise, said she was “a ‘child of the ’70s’ who overcame obstacles by finding middle ground. … [She spent] her first year … Continue reading The Hand of Oppression: Plea Bargaining Processes and the Coercion of Criminal Defendants
Early coal mines didn’t have good ventilation, and miners were at risk from dangerous gases in the mines. So miners would bring canaries into the mines because they were sensitive to the gases and provided a warning of danger. The canaries would sing until they died from the gases. When they stopped singing, miners knew … Continue reading Canaries in the Litigation Coal Mine
Law school teaches students that law is a seamless web of rules emanating from authorities like statutes and cases which they must memorize and finely parse in hypothetical cases. In real life, practitioners generally think of law in terms of Oliver Wendell Holmes’s famous definition: “prophecies of what the courts will do in fact.” Of … Continue reading The Role of Law in Legal Disputes
People often say that dispute resolution processes aren’t “one size fits all.” When practitioners are asked to opine about hypothetical problems, they often say “it depends” and they make “case by case” decisions. They are telling the truth. Lawyers make complex decisions as negotiators, litigation advocates, and mediators based on a lot of factors, so … Continue reading Teaching Students to Think Like Practitioners