Law Commons^™

Using Mindfulness Practice To Work With Emotions, Deborah Calloway

Nevada Law Journal

The most important point to understand is that working with and understanding our own emotional reactions is an essential prerequisite to working skillfully with emotionally charged individuals in disputes. Training in “mediation techniques” designed to help us recognize and work with emotions in the mediation and negotiation context will not work unless we have practiced working with our own emotions consistently in our ordinary lives. Otherwise, in the heat of the moment during a negotiation or mediation, we are likely to forget every technique we have learned. Habitual patterns of behavior simply take hold.

This article seeks to provide some …

Yes, And: Core Concerns, Internal Mindfulness, And External Mindfulness For Emotional Balance, Lie Detection, And Successful Negotiation, Clark Freshman

Nevada Law Journal

This article suggests that both parts of Leonard Riskin's latest article and parts of the argument on “core concerns” by Roger Fisher and Dan Shapiro may, with certain individuals in certain circumstances, not work. Indeed, focusing on core concerns may even produce less functional emotions and therefore decrease the chances of an optimal outcome. This article addresses the limitations inherent within the core concerns approach and suggests “external mindfulness” as a complementary skill to check when core concerns help and when other tools, including both internal and external mindfulness, may help as well as--or better than--the core concerns approach. We …

Mindfulness, Emotions, And Mental Models: Theory That Leads To More Effective Dispute Resolution, Peter Reilly

Nevada Law Journal

This Article suggests that law students and lawyers can be introduced to, and even begin to master, some of the same transformational principles, skill sets, and behaviors that poured forth from FDR as a result of his intense physical and personal challenges. At the core of nearly all great negotiators, mediators, lawyers, and leaders is a person who has learned to connect with other people, that is, to build relationships of trust, cooperation, and collaboration. Additionally, this Article argues that where people first learn a sense of self and others through both theoretical and practical knowledge and understanding of mindfulness …

From Signal To Semantic: Uncovering The Emotional Dimension Of Negotiation, Daniel L. Shapiro

Nevada Law Journal

The author co-created the Core Concerns Framework as a pragmatic model to help people address the emotional dimension of negotiation. Dealing directly with the variety of emotions that arise in a negotiation can overwhelm our cognitive capacity, especially in a high-stakes context, where there are multiple layers of communication, processes, and substantive issues. The framework suggests that negotiators turn their attention to a subset of motives--what the authors call core concerns--to illuminate and navigate the emotional dimension of negotiation.

In the Nevada Law Journal symposium on mindfulness and the core concerns, Professor Clark Freshman calls into question how “core” the …

Mindfulness, Emotions, And Ethics: The Right Stuff?, Ellen Waldman

Nevada Law Journal

This essay celebrates Leonard Riskin's call to arms while suggesting some limits to what mindfulness can achieve in the ethical realm. I discuss recent developments in neuroethics that imply a prominent role for emotions in establishing ethical restraint. The Article also surveys a growing body of evidence that suggests the directive power of our emotions remains largely hidden from and impervious to the control of our “reasoning” selves. Lastly, the author examines what Riskin has, in an earlier work, described as the ethical hard case in light of recent explorations into the emotional wellsprings of deontological versus consequentialist thinking. Although …