Law Commons^™

Massachusetts Community Mediation Center Grant Program: Fiscal Year 2014 Report & Evaluation, Susan Jeghelian, Madhawa Palihapitiya, Kaila O. Eisenkraft

Massachusetts Office of Public Collaboration Publications

The Community Mediation Center Grant Program, funded by the commonwealth and administered by the state’s office of dispute resolution, was established to “promote the broad use of community mediation in all regions of the state” by awarding operating grants to eligible community mediation centers. This annual report describes the progress made in broadening access to community mediation by the grant program under the challenge of reduced state funding in FY 2014. Due to the funding cut, fewer centers were funded in FY 2014 compared to FY 2013, which reduced the quantity of services provided. However, the amount of money per …

Good Pretrial Lawyering: Planning To Get To Yes Sooner, Cheaper, And Better, John M. Lande

Faculty Publications

Although the ostensible purpose for pretrial litigation is to prepare for trial, such preparation is inextricably intertwined with negotiation because the expected trial outcome is a major factor affecting negotiation. Indeed, since most litigated cases are settled, good litigators prepare for negotiation at least as much as trial. The lawyers interviewed for this article, who were selected because of their good reputations, described how they prepare for both possibilities. They recommend taking charge of their cases from the outset, which includes getting a clear understanding of clients and their interests, developing good relationships with counterpart lawyers, carefully investigating the cases, …

C-Drum News, Fall 2014

The C-DRUM News

No abstract provided.

Book Review: “The Good Lawyer: Seeking Quality In The Practice Of Law”, Linda H. Edwards

Scholarly Works

In their first collaboration, The Happy Lawyer, the writing team of Nancy Levit and Doug Linder tackled a crucially important subject: how to have a happy life in the law. As part of that project, they interviewed more than two hundred lawyers about what makes them happy in their jobs. Levit and Linder noticed that happy lawyers nearly always talked about doing good work. Curious about the connection, the authors turned to recent research in neuroscience and learned, not to their surprise, that a key to a happy life is, indeed, the sense of doing good work. It is …

Using The Theories Of Exit, Voice, Loyalty, And Procedural Justice To Reconceptualize Brazil's Rejection Of Bilateral Investment Treaties, Nancy A. Welsh, Andrea Kupfer Schneider, Kathryn Rimpfel

Faculty Scholarship

In the past decade, investor-state arbitration has made tremendous gains in both credibility and use. There is now widespread accession to the Convention on the Settlement of Investment Disputes between States and Nationals of Other States (“ICSID Convention” or “Washington Convention”). States have executed more than 2,000 bilateral investment treaties (BITs) defining the terms and conditions under which one (“investor”) state’s nationals and companies will invest in the other (“host”) state. Such terms include provisions allowing foreign investors to initiate arbitration proceedings against the host state, and at this point, more than 500 disputes have been submitted to investor-state arbitration. …

Justice Deferred Is Justice Denied: We Must End Our Failed Experiment In Deferring Corporate Criminal Prosecutions, Peter Reilly

Faculty Scholarship

According to the U.S. Department of Justice (“DOJ”), deferred prosecution agreements are said to occupy an “important middle ground” between declining to prosecute on the one hand, and trials or guilty pleas on the other. A top DOJ official has declared that, over the last decade, the agreements have become a “mainstay” of white collar criminal law enforcement; a prominent criminal law professor calls their increased use part of the “biggest change in corporate law enforcement policy in the last ten years.”

However, despite deferred prosecution’s apparent rise in popularity among law enforcement officials, the article sets forth the argument …

Bargaining In The Shadow Of The Best-Interests Standard: The Close Connection Between Substance And Process In Resolving Divorce-Related Parenting Disputes, Jana B. Singer

Faculty Scholarship

This essay, written for a Symposium celebrating the child custody scholarship of Professor Robert Mnookin, examines the close connection between changes in substantive child custody doctrine and changes in custody dispute resolution processes over the past 30 years. Part I of the article explores how the widespread adoption of an unmediated “best interest of the child” standard, and the ensuing rejection of the sole custody paradigm, precipitated a shift from adversarial to non-adversarial resolution of divorce-related parenting disputes. Part II of the essay reverses the direction of the analytic lens and considers how the shift from adversarial to non-adversarial dispute …

The Trouble With Categories: What Theory Can Teach Us About The Doctrine-Skills Divide, Linda H. Edwards

Scholarly Works

We might not need another article decrying the doctrine/skills dichotomy. That conversation seems increasingly old and tired. But like it or not, in conversations about the urgent need to reform legal education, the dichotomy’s entailments confront us at every turn. Is there something more to be said? Perhaps surprisingly, yes. We teach our students to examine language carefully, to question received categories, and to understand legal questions in light of their history and theory. Yet when we talk about the doctrine/skills divide, we seem to forget our own instruction.

This article does not exactly take sides in the typical skills …

Mediator Ethical Breaches: Implications For Public Policy, Sharon Press

Faculty Scholarship

Court-connected mediation, which includes both court mandated and court encouraged mediation, has become a well-established part of the judicial system in the United States. There are many public policy implications of this phenomenon. These include the underlying goals of the development of court-connection mediation and the responsibility to the public once a court-connected mediation program is established to ensure that the public has access to quality providers of mediation services. Once a court-connected mediation program has established qualifications and ethical standards for mediators, there is a public policy obligation for there also to be a mechanism to educate, reprimand or …

Open-Minded Listening, Jonathan R. Cohen

UF Law Faculty Publications

Parties in conflict do not typically listen to one another well. On a physical level they hear what their counterparts say, but on a deeper level they do not truly absorb or think seriously about their counterparts’ words. If they listen at all, they listen with an ear toward how they can refute rather than toward what they may learn. This article explores how we might change this. In contrast to prior research examining external aspects of listening (e.g., how being listened to influences the speaker), this article probes the internal side of listening, specifically, whether the listener will allow …