Law Commons^™

Real Practice Systems Annotated Bibliography, John Lande

Faculty Publications

Real Practice Systems (RPS) theory holds that practitioners’ practice systems are based on their personal histories, values, goals, motivations, knowledge, and skills as well as the parties and the cases in their work. RPS analysis can be used in many dispute resolution roles such as mediator, advocate in mediation, negotiator, and litigator generally. In mediation, practitioners develop categories of cases, parties, and behavior patterns that lead them to design routine procedures and strategies for dealing with recurring challenges before, during, and after mediation sessions.

RPS theory is the culmination of much of the work in my scholarly career. The bibliography …

Law Students Can Use Portfolios To Plan Their Practice Systems, John Lande

Faculty Blogs

This post describes how law schools can help students plan for successful careers by using Real Practice System self-assessments to guide them in developing individualized portfolios. Portfolios identify students’ learning objectives and experiences designed to achieve them. Portfolios may include a variety of elements such as writing samples, video recordings, grades, faculty evaluations, clinical course journals, and extracurricular experiences.

Helping Law Students Define And Pursue Success, John Lande

Faculty Blogs

This post collects prior posts about how to help law students define and pursue professional success.

Real Lawyering Practice Systems, John Lande

Faculty Blogs

Most of the pieces in the RPS Project have focused on mediation. The theory is not limited to mediation, and this post applies it to lawyering.

Technology In Real Practice Systems, John Lande

Faculty Blogs

This post uses the RPS mediation checklists to illustrate practitioners’ great reliance on technology.

Recruiting The Right Candidate, Cynthia Bassett

Faculty Publications

The market for hiring a law librarian has changed significantly over the last few years. Those on both sides of the equation are a little uncertain about the whole process, wondering when the job search should start, how much to expect in pay, and what aspects of a position are up for discussion. The challenge of a limited pipeline of law librarians requires new approaches to recruiting.

Randy Kiser’S New Book On Professional Judgment For Lawyers, John Lande

Faculty Blogs

This post describes Randall Kiser’s book, Professional Judgment for Lawyers. He defines professional judgment as “the deliberate synthesis of an attorney’s knowledge, experience, skills, discernment, and character to ethically advance a client’s interest.” The book combines empirical research, cognitive and social psychology, organizational behavior, legal ethics, and neuroscience to improve decision-making by attorneys, clients, judges, arbitrators, mediators, and juries.

Political Polarization In America: Its Impact On Industrial Democracy And Labor Law, Rafael Gely

Faculty Publications

This article explores the impact that political polarization is having in the social, legal, and regulatory space, particularly on American worker-management relations. Polarization is affecting decisions involving social relationships and market transactions, the ability of institutions built to generate debate and discussion to successfully complete these missions, and people's willingness to listen to and engage with views contrary to their own.

Advice About Written Advocacy From The Washington Court Of Appeals, Douglas E. Abrams

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Training Your Mediator Bot, John Lande

Faculty Blogs

This somewhat tongue-in-cheek post discusses biases in AI systems. Noting that AI bots need to be “trained,” this post suggests that untrained mediator bots may spew out unwanted interventions such as providing undesired evaluations of BATNA values – or failing to provide desired evaluations. So mediators probably will need to co-mediate with their bots for a while to observe and correct its biases. Ironically, bots may produce language that normal humans understand much better than the confusing jargon we habitually use. So the mediator bots may need to train human mediators.

Teaching Students To Focus On Party Decision-Making, John Lande

Faculty Blogs

This post describes why law schools don’t teach students very much about helping clients make decisions and suggests techniques for doing so. It suggests (1) focusing on parties’ roles throughout relevant courses, (2) including meaningful party roles in simulations and competitions, (3) using simulations focusing solely on preparation, (4) using multi-stage simulations, (5) helping students focus on parties’ intangible interests in simulations and Stone Soup interviews, (6) using the terms “pre-mediation-session” or “before mediation sessions,” (7) taking advantage of the litigation interest and risk assessment framework and materials, and (8) recommending that schools offer a course on strategic case evaluation …

Focus On Party Decision-Making, John M. Lande

Faculty Blogs

A major motivation in the modern dispute resolution movement has been to increase and improve parties’ decision-making in their legal disputes. Parties can participate more effectively in negotiation and mediation if they engage in decision-making early in disputes. This suggests the importance of good preparation before negotiation and mediation sessions. When parties are well-prepared in advance, they are as knowledgeable, confident, and assertive as possible in making decisions in their cases

Charlie Irvine's Challenge To Mediators To Describe Your Mediation System, John M. Lande

Faculty Blogs

Charlie Irvine is the Course Leader on the University of Strathclyde’s (Scotland) MSc/LLM in Mediation and Conflict Resolution and the Director of the Strathclyde Mediation Clinic. The Clinic provides a free mediation service in which experienced practitioners work alongside trainee mediators to help people resolve disputes without going to court or tribunal. The following is Charlie’s Director’s Column published in Mediation Matters!, the Clinic’s quarterly newsletter. Irvine wrote an account of his own mediation system that was one of ten real mediation systems Lande analyzed in Real Mediation Systems to Help Parties and Mediators Achieve Their Goals.

Does The Community Choice Aggregation Approach Advance Distributed Generation Development? A Case Study Of Municipalities In California, Robin M. Rotman, Jun Deng

Faculty Publications

Globally, decentralized energy systems are gaining popularity due to their potential for energy accessibility, energy resilience, and sustainability benefits. Existing research on an energy system decentralization approach, community choice aggregation (CCA), shows its ability to lower energy costs and increase renewable electricity consumption for U.S. communities. Nevertheless, research on the relationship between CCA and distributed electricity generation development is lacking. This paper fills this gap by investigating if the CCA approach associates with distributed generation capacity interconnection in California municipalities. The finding shows that although the average capacity has increased for all municipalities throughout the study period, contrary to proponents’ …

References To Beatles Songs In Advocacy And Judicial Opinions, Douglas E. Abrams

Faculty Publications

This article surveys the indelible mark that the Beatles (Paul McCartney, John Lennon, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr) continue to leave on courts in the United States more than half a century after the quartet burst onto the American scene with their three television appearances on the Ed Sullivan Show in February of 1964, six years before the band’s breakup.

Party Self-Empowerment From Preparation For Mediation Sessions, John Lande

Faculty Blogs

If parties are well-prepared before mediation sessions, they will be knowledgeable, confident, and assertive so that they can exercise their decision-making authority as well as possible. Well-prepared parties can make decisions before and during mediation sessions rather than simply relying on mediators to promote their self-determination. In other words, they will feel more empowered to participate productively. Depending on the circumstances, mediators, lawyers, courts, and/or mediation programs may help parties get prepared.

Len Riskin Pulls It All Together In Managing Conflict Mindfully, John Lande

Faculty Blogs

This post describes Len Riskin’s impressive career and summarizes themes in his book, Managing Conflict Mindfully: Don’t Believe Everything You Think. He argues that people can wisely manage conflict by learning to use and integrate three sets of ideas and techniques – negotiation, mindfulness, and internal family systems (IFS). You can think of IFS as the conversation or negotiation between different voices in our heads. Rather than conceiving people as having only a single “unitary” self, IFS recognizes the “multiplicity” of our selves.

What Lawyers Can Teach Their Employed Law Students About 'Impactful Legal Writing', Douglas E. Abrams

Faculty Publications

This article concerns the value of teaching employed law students about the potency of “impactful legal writing” – legal writing that can have a substantial impact on someone other than the student writer. Much of the employer’s most instructive teaching about impactful legal writing occurs at the beginning of an assignment, rather than solely during review after the student has completed the assignment. This article identifies four ways an employed law student’s impactful writing when fulfilling assignments differs from the effect of students’ academic writing in law school. Each of the four ways enables the employer to deliver practical lessons …

Problem-Resolution Lawyering Across The Twenty-First Century Law Curriculum, John Lande

Faculty Blogs

This post highlights an article by Kris Franklin and F. Peter Phillips. They argue, “Framing lawyers’ professional role as helping clients resolve problems – and therefore in turn, conceiving law school coursework as preparation for that role – should alter teaching, learning, and law practice in ways that inevitably improves each.” The article includes “exemplars” of ways to shift the legal curriculum to focus on lawyers as problem resolution partners.

A Proposal For The Joint Development Of Generative Ai For The Dispute Resolution Profession, John Lande

Faculty Blogs

This post by Gary Doernhoefer proposes the development of a data set for the dispute resolution profession as the basis for AI systems. The ideal model would be for a collaboration in the dispute resolution field to create the refined data set, establish guardrails, and set privacy parameters for the use of the data. This would involve a centralized advisory board to address concerns such as (1) privacy requirements for how the queries are received, stored, and used, (2) the expertise needed to curate additional training materials, (3) shared costs of development, and (4) gaining the cooperation of industry authors …

Intersectional Management: An Analysis Of Cooperation And Competition On American Public Lands, Robin M. Rotman, Abigail M. Hunt

Faculty Publications

The United States government holds public lands in trust for the whole of the American people. This article focuses on National Monuments under the Antiquities Act. It argues that the federal government should renew its approach to the management of these lands by incorporating principles of environmental justice and long- term environmental viability. The article begins by examining the historical and legal foundations of federal lands in the United States, with a focus on the Antiquities Act. It then reflects on recent litigation and political controversy surrounding Bears Ears National Monument and Grand Staircase–Escalante National Monument, to illustrate how the …

Real Mediation Systems To Help Parties And Mediators Achieve Their Goals, John M. Lande

Faculty Publications

This article argues that it is time for a paradigm shift in our current general mediation theory because of numerous problems. Our current theory is incomplete at best and seriously misleading at worst. The traditional mediation models are oversimplified, poorly mapping onto the reality of practice. They combine multiple elements that are not necessarily correlated. Many practitioners ignore them because they are confusing or not helpful. People do not understand the theoretical meanings because the terms are not consistent with commonly understood language. Arguments about what is or is not real or good mediation have spawned unhelpful ideological divisions in …

Trading Nonenforcement, Ryan Snyder

Faculty Publications

In recent years, federal agencies have increasingly used nonenforcement as a bargaining chip—promising not to enforce a legal requirement in exchange for a regulated party’s promise to do something else that the law doesn’t require. This Article takes an in-depth look at how these nonenforcement trades work, why agencies and regulated parties make them, and the effects they have on social policy. The Article argues that these trades pose serious risks: Agencies often use trading to evade procedural and substantive limits on their power. The trades themselves present fairness problems, both because they tend to reward large, well-connected firms and …

Achieving The Achievable: Realistic Labor Law Reform, Rafael Gely

Faculty Publications

A common reprise among labor activists and scholars has been that for the fortunes of labor to change, the law must change. Prompted perhaps by a seeming surge in labor movement activity over the past few years, including headline-grabbing strikes and recent union victories at several U.S. Starbucks locations, various labor law activists and scholars have called to seize the moment and proposed the enactment of comprehensive labor law reform. We argue in this Article that broad-scale labor law reform is unlikely to be enacted by the current U.S. Congress or even have all its provisions pass muster when potentially …

Ai, Adr, And Anxiety, John Lande

Faculty Blogs

This post discusses AI generally, growing anxiety about it and modern life generally, and how we can manage this anxiety. Anxiety about AI may be feeding into a more general anxiety about events in the US and around the world. We can address anxiety by focusing on what we actually can control. Regarding AI and ADR, I suggest that the machine mediation “glass” will be partly empty and partly full – as is human mediation. It’s important to recognize our own reactions to and fears about AI, have as accurate and balanced an understanding of what’s happening as possible, acknowledge …

Avatar Mediation, John Lande

Faculty Blogs

This post speculates about how AI systems might mediate (or assist in mediation) in the not-too-distant future.

Policy Comparison Of Lead Hunting Ammunition Bans And Voluntary Nonlead Programs For California Condors, Robin M. Rotman, John H. Schulz, Samantha Totoni, Sonja A. Wilhelm Stanis, Christine Jie Li, Mark Morgan, Damon M. Hall, Elisabeth B. Webb

Faculty Publications

The endangered California condor (Gymnogyps californianus) is negatively affected by lead poisoning from spent lead‐based hunting ammunition. Because lead poisoning is the primary mortality factor affecting condors, the California Fish and Game Commission banned lead hunting ammunition during 2008 in the southern California condor range followed by a statewide ban implemented in 2019. In contrast, the Arizona Game and Fish Department instituted an outreach and awareness program encouraging voluntary use of nonlead hunting ammunition in the northern portion of the state during 2005 and a similar program was launched in Utah during 2012. The juxtaposition of policy tools provided a …

Solving The Valuation Challenge: The Ultra Method For Taxing Extreme Wealth, David Gamage, Brian Galle, Darien Shanske

Faculty Publications

Recent reporting based on leaked tax returns of the ultra-rich confirms what experts have long suspected: for the wealthiest Americans, paying taxes is mostly optional. Some of the country's richest have reported annual incomes that would be modest for a school teacher, even as the share of wealth held by the top .1% is at its highest in nearly a century.

Experts have long understood that one problem sits at the root cause of many of the tax system's failures to reach the very rich: valuation. Because it is difficult to appraise complex or unique assets, modern tax systems instead …

How Law Students' Part-Time Legal Employment Can Help Employers Improve Their Own Writing Skills, Douglas E. Abrams

Faculty Publications

Professor Abrams authors a column, Writing it Right, in the Journal of the Missouri Bar. In a variety of contexts, the column stresses the fundamentals of quality legal writing — conciseness, precision, simplicity, and clarity.

Should We Get Rid Of The Bar Exam?, John Lande

Faculty Blogs

This post discusses an article analyzing empirical data about licensing of lawyers in Wisconsin. Graduates of Wisconsin schools have a diploma privilege and are licensed in that state without taking a bar exam. The article argues that bar exams generally don’t fulfill their purpose of protecting the public. They consume tremendous resources of the legal profession, law schools, and law student and divert attention from activities that are likely to be more effective and valuable.