Law Commons^™

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 …

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, …

A Framework For Advancing Negotiation Theory: Implications From A Study Of How Lawyers Reach Agreement In Pretrial Litigation, John M. Lande

Faculty Publications

The prevailing negotiation theory tries to fit lots of square pegs into just two round holes–adversarial or cooperative bargaining. In the real world, negotiation comes in many different shapes, not just circles and squares. Analyzing law school textbook definitions of the traditional models, this article demonstrates that the two “round holes” in current negotiation theory are poorly defined. It also presents empirical accounts of actual pretrial negotiations to demonstrate that the theoretical models do not fit some real-life negotiations. It argues that it is time to replace the traditional models with a flexible framework that can accommodate virtually all legal …

Trial And Settlement: A Study Of High-Low Agreements, J. J. Prescott, Kathryn E. Spier, Albert Yoon

Articles

This article presents the first systematic theoretical and empirical study of highlow agreements in civil litigation. A high-low agreement is a private contract that, if signed by litigants before trial, constrains any plaintiff’s recovery to a specified range. In our theoretical model, trial is both costly and risky. When litigants have divergent subjective beliefs and are mutually optimistic about their trial prospects, cases may fail to settle. In these cases, high-low agreements can be in litigants’ mutual interest because they limit the risk of outlier awards while still allowing mutually beneficial speculation. Using claims data from a national insurance company, …

Negotiating Bribery: Toward Increased Transparency, Consistency, And Fairness In Pretrial Bargaining Under The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, Peter Reilly

Faculty Scholarship

This article will explore the factors that contribute to less-than-optimal transparency, consistency, and fairness in pre-trial bargaining under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. The article will conclude with recommendations to strengthen the current system and make it more fair.

The article is divided into four Parts: Part I will discuss the extent of the bribery problem worldwide; the history of the FCPA; and the reasons behind the recent dramatic increase in FCPA enforcement.

Part II will discuss the elements that make up FCPA ‘jurisprudence’ given that so few cases are litigated in court; the history of using DPAs and NPAs …

Bargaining With Consequences: Leverage And Coercion In Negotiation, Paul F. Kirgis

Faculty Law Review Articles

Leverage has been called “negotiation’s prime mover,” conferring power to reach agreement “on your terms.” This power, however, is not always benign. When a negotiator has sufficient power to compel a counterparty to accept a set of unfavorable terms, the use of leverage may cross a line into inappropriate or illegal coercion. While coercion has been the subject of rich philosophical investigation, the topic of coercive power has received only cursory treatment in the negotiation literature. This article seeks to fill that gap by analyzing the uses and limits of negotiating leverage, which I define as power rooted in consequences. …

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 …

Escaping From Lawyers' Prison Of Fear, John Lande

Faculty Publications

Lawyers regularly experience numerous fears endemic to their work. This is not surprising considering that lawyers generally operate in environments that frequently stimulate many fears. Lawyers’ fears can lead them to enhance their performance due to increased preparation and effective “thinking on their feet.” Fear is problematic when it is out of proportion to actual threats, is expressed inappropriately, or is chronically unaddressed effectively. It can lead to sub-optimal and counterproductive performance through paralysis, ritualized behavior, or inappropriate aggression. Some lawyers’ fears unnecessarily prevent them from performing well, producing good results for clients, earning more income, and experiencing greater satisfaction …

Book Review, Anna Spain

Publications

No abstract provided.

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 …

The Marrakesh Treaty For Visually Impaired Persons: Why A Treaty Was Preferable To Soft Law, Margot E. Kaminski, Shlomit Yanisky-Ravid

Publications

This paper addresses the debates leading up to the recently adopted international treaty on copyright exceptions for the visually impaired, the Marrakesh International Treaty to Facilitate Access to Published Works for Persons Who Are Blind, Visually Impaired, or Otherwise Print Disabled. This treaty was successfully adopted by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) in June 2013.

Leading up to the negotiation of this instrument, multiple UN member states pushed for the instrument to be negotiated as soft law instead of a treaty. We argue that making this instrument soft law would have precluded its success. WIPO thus correctly chose to …

Contemporary Practice Of The United States Relating To International Law, Kristina Daugirdas, Julian Davis Mortenson

Articles

• Progress Is Made Implementing U.S.-Russia Framework for Eliminating Syrian Chemical Weapons • United States Advocates for Syrian Peace Conference • United States Extends Deadline for Signing of Bilateral Security Agreement with Afghanistan • China Announces New Air Defense Identification Zone over East China Sea, Prompting U.S. Response • United States and Six Other States Reach Interim Agreement on Iranian Nuclear Program

The Cheater’S “High”— Harmonize Ethics, Research And Negation Behavior, Elayne E. Greenberg

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

In the context of negotiations, how does “cheater’s high” influence our ethical behavior, decision-making and negotiation strategy? “Cheater’s high” is the term coined by behavioral ethics researchers to describe the positive feeling we experience when we cheat. Rather than feel guilty for these ethical transgressions as was previously believed, those who cheat actually experience a positive effect that further incentivizes the unethical behavior to continue. Even though some who are perched on their ivory tower may feel immune from “cheater’s high,” social scientists remind us that at times we all cheat to varying degrees. This cheating reality is problematic …