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Legal education

Dispute Resolution and Arbitration

Selected Works

Articles 1 - 6 of 6

Full-Text Articles in Law

Mindfulness: Foundational Training For Dispute Resolution, Leonard Riskin May 2015

Mindfulness: Foundational Training For Dispute Resolution, Leonard Riskin

Leonard L Riskin

This Article addresses the problem of mindlessness in counseling, negotiating, and mediating, and offers potential solutions and recommendations for developing foundational capacities through training in mindfulness meditation.


Teaching And Learning From The Mediations In Barry Werth's Damages, Leonard L. Riskin May 2015

Teaching And Learning From The Mediations In Barry Werth's Damages, Leonard L. Riskin

Leonard L Riskin

This essay is based primarily on materials the author developed for courses taught at the University of Missouri-Columbia, School of Law, in the winter 2002 and 2003 semesters, based on Barry Werth's book, "Damages."


Damages: Using A Case Study To Teach Law, Lawyering, And Dispute Resolution, Leonard Riskin Dec 2014

Damages: Using A Case Study To Teach Law, Lawyering, And Dispute Resolution, Leonard Riskin

Leonard L Riskin

Seven law school faculty members and one practicing attorney recently developed and taught a wholly new kind of law course based on an already published case study, Damages: One Family's Legal Struggles in the World of Medicine, by Barry Werth, an investigative reporter who spent several years researching to write the book. Damages, an in-depth account of a medical malpractice case, presents the perspectives of the injured family, the defendant physician, the lawyers, and the three mediators. In this Symposium Introduction, the authors provide a summary of Werth's book, explain why they decided to create a course based on his …


The Contemplative Lawyer: On The Potential Contributions Of Mindfulness Meditation To Law Students, Lawyers, And Their Clients, Leonard L. Riskin Dec 2014

The Contemplative Lawyer: On The Potential Contributions Of Mindfulness Meditation To Law Students, Lawyers, And Their Clients, Leonard L. Riskin

Leonard L Riskin

This Article proposes that introducing mindfulness meditation into the legal profession may improve practitioners' well-being and performance and weaken the dominance of adversarial mind-sets. By enabling some lawyers to make more room for - and act from - broader and deeper perspectives, mindfulness can help lawyers provide more appropriate service (especially through better listening and negotiation) and gain more personal satisfaction from their work. Part I of this article describes a number of problems associated with law school and law practice. Part II sets forth a variety of ways in which lawyers, law schools, and professional organizations have tried to …


Thinking Like Thinkers: Is The Art And Discipline Of An "Attitude Of Suspended Conclusion" Lost On Lawyers?, Donald J. Kochan Aug 2011

Thinking Like Thinkers: Is The Art And Discipline Of An "Attitude Of Suspended Conclusion" Lost On Lawyers?, Donald J. Kochan

Donald J. Kochan

In his 1910 book, How We Think, John Dewey proclaimed that “the most important factor in the training of good mental habits consists in acquainting the attitude of suspended conclusion. . .” This Article explores that insight and describes its meaning and significance in the enterprise of thinking generally and its importance in law school education specifically. It posits that the law would be best served if lawyers think like thinkers and adopt an attitude of suspended conclusion in their problem solving affairs. Only when conclusion is suspended is there space for the exploration of the subject at hand. The …


The Discourse Beneath: Emotional Epistemology In Legal Deliberation And Negotiation, Erin Ryan Dec 2004

The Discourse Beneath: Emotional Epistemology In Legal Deliberation And Negotiation, Erin Ryan

Erin Ryan

All lawyers negotiate, and all negotiators deliberate. This article addresses the pervasive but unrefined use of emotional insight by deliberating and negotiating lawyers, and suggests that legal education could improve lawyering by adopting a fuller model of legal thinking that takes account of this “epistemological emotionality.” In forming the beliefs that underlie choices made during deliberation and negotiation, people rely on insights informed by past and present emotional experience. Such epistemological emotional input fuels a pre-linguistic, quasi-inductive reasoning process that enables us to draw on stored information about emotional phenomena to hypothesize about motives, behavior, and potential consequences. As deliberation …