As I mentioned last month, I don’t know that formulas always make things clearer but an NPR story from July on handshakes might prove me wrong.  A hat tip to Natalie Fleury for this idea :   Marketplace on NPR aired a story about the science behind the handshake.  Geoffrey Beattie, a professor at the University of Manchester researching handshakes [...]

Once in a while a job posting in the ADR world catches our eye.  That’s the case here, and it is a big one – the Executive Director of the ABA’s Dispute Resolution Section.  Part of the job posting is below, but go here for the full posting.  As I mentioned earlier, Kim Knight is stepping down for a position at [...]

Creating a split with the Third and Eleventh Circuits, the Ninth Circuit has held that a mandatory arbitration clause in a credit card agreement is unenforceable under the Credit Repair Organizations Act. The case, Greenwood v. CompuCredit Corp., was a class action stemming from a credit card marketed to consumers with weak credit as [...]

Wallace Warfield died about a week ago, and the world of conflict resolution is now far less rich. Wallace taught at ICAR at George Mason, and he did stints with SPIDR, with ACUS, with Community Relations Service at DOJ,  with Eastern Mennonite University, and with street gang worked in NYC.  He worked in conflict zones in [...]

Kim Knight, the Executive Director of the ABA’s Dispute Resolution Section, has resigned her post to take a position with the AARP.  Having worked with her the last few years, I can say that she will definitely be missed.  Good luck Kim !! Here’s the announcement sent out by Wayne Thorpe, the Section’s President. Our Section Director, Kim [...]

In my earlier post about Charles Craver’s most recent article, I find myself in agreement with most of what he says including his description of WIN-win negotiators. But there must be something that I disagree with him about, and that is true.  Craver claims that comment 2 to Rule 4.1 “unequivocally acknowledges” that settlement intentions [...]

That is the title of Charlie Craver’s article in the most recent edition of the Ohio State Journal on Dispute Resolution.  And yes, it’s about my favorite topic these days, negotiation ethics.  Craver comes from the realpolitik school of negotiation, and if you didn’t already know this, his article makes that quite clear.  I like this [...]

I co-taught an Intensive Negotiation course last week (an exhausting 28 credits in one week), and I wanted to do an exercise demonstrating value creation to help dispel the fixed-pie bias. In my smaller, regular negotiation classes, I typically do a Snack Exchange exercise modified from the version created by Jay Folberg. But [...]

Monday August 30th is the deadline to respond to the RFP for the ABA DR Section Conference in Denver on April 13-16, 2011.  My original post announcing the RFP w/ a link to the announcement and submission web site can be accessed here.  If you’re like me, you’ll be getting your proposal(s) in at the wire. 

A New York lower court has denied a “feeder” hedge fund’s motion to vacate an arbitration award issued by a majority of an American Arbitration Association panel in connection with an investor’s claim against the fund for losses related to the Madoff Ponzi scheme.  In Wiederhorn v. Merkin (601265/2010), New York Supreme Court, New York County, [...]

The New York Times just ran an article (full text below) describing the more careful examination some judges are providing to possible settlements related to financial institutions’ misdeeds.  The role of judicial review of settlements is not new, as anyone familiar with Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 23 knows.  The public scrutiny of that judicial [...]

Until this evening, I had no familiarity with the Bell Labs study, examining predictors of high levels of performance in the workplace.  Their study suggested that it wasn’t grades, or other kinds of academic success, and it wasn’t even IQ or other typical academic-success predictors.  Instead, after some years of study, they named at least [...]

The AALS Dispute Resolution Section’s Executive Committee is seeking a host for the 5th Annual Works-in-Progress Conference to take place in the fall of 2011.  The RFP is in its entirety below.   And don’t forget that this year’s WIP Conference will be taking place at the University of Oregon School of Law and promises to be [...]

Robert Axelrod, surely familiar to most of us who teach dispute resolution, co-authored an Op-Ed in the New York Times shortly after the Supreme Court’s decision in Holder v Humanitarian Law Project.  (Available here, and reproduced below.) Somehow, I missed this article when it first came out.  Tip of the hat to Jen Reynolds for [...]

Today is the first day of Orientation for our incoming 1Ls, and it gives me time to reflect on the faculty roster changes in the ADR field.  Here are those that I’ve been able to come up with so far.  If I have missed one that you know about, please list that change in the comments below. Good luck to [...]

In a development likely to reduce the number of matrimonial disputes going through acrimonious litigation in New York, Governor David Patterson finally signed into law yesterday an amendment to New York’s domestic relations law adding “irreconcilable differences” as a valid ground for divorce.  New York was the only state remaining in the country to require proof [...]

Gina Brown and Jean Sternlight have announced the winner of the 2010 Boskey Essay contest:  Flora Go, a student at Harvard Law School, for her essay, “Mediation as Practiced in Criminal Law: The Present, the Pitfalls, and the Potential.” Formal announcement appears here. And the essay itself is available here. MM

Kent Syverud, Dean of the Washington University School of Law, has been named one of two trustees for the $20 billion Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill Trust.  As trustee, Dean Syverud will be administering the trust, which presumably means he’ll be signing off on the paying of monies that Kenneth Feinberg and his group award to spill victims. Syverud, [...]

Earlier this summer, I attended a talk by David Brooks at the Chautauqua Institution in New York.  (Quick aside: The Chautauqua Institution is as close to heaven as any place I have ever found.  How’s that for an endorsement?)  During his talk, David Brooks told the audience that there are, apparently, more Americans who own [...]

Herbert Kritzer has posted The Antecedents of Disputes: Complaining and Claiming on SSRN. The article is a compendium of empirical research into the “naming, blaming, and claiming” process that leads to disputes. (See Felstiner, Abel, and Sarat, The Emergence of Disputes: Naming, Blaming, Claiming . . .) It goes much deeper than [...]