Dispute Resolution and Arbitration 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 …

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 …

Mandatory Binding Arbitration And The Demise Of The Seventh Amendment Right To A Jury Trial, Jean R. Sternlight

Scholarly Works

How can the body of law which protects the federal constitutional jury trial right be reconciled with a body of arbitration law which often states such propositions as (1) arbitration is favored; (2) arbitration clauses may be upheld absent a showing of voluntary, knowing, or intentional consent; (3) the party opposing arbitration bears the burden of proof; (4) arbitration can sometimes be imposed using unsigned envelope "stuffers," handbooks, and warranties; and (5) ambiguous contracts should be construed broadly to support arbitration? To be valid, in most courts the waiver and whether it was actually state arbitration clauses need not be …

Identifying Real Dichotomies Underlying The False Dichotomy: Twenty-First Century Mediation In An Eclectic Regime, Jeffrey W. Stempel

Scholarly Works

Some people (lawyers, scholars, judges, dispute resolvers, policymakers) are more concerned about fidelity to procedural protocols while others are more concerned with the substantive rules governing disputes and substantive outcomes. Those in the dispute resolution community preferring facilitation tend to be proceduralists. For them, the observance of proper procedure is a high goal, perhaps the dominant goal. They reason, often implicitly, that adherence to the rules of procedure is the essence of neutrality, fairness, and the proper role of a dispute resolving apparatus. At some level, usually subconscious, there is a post-modern philosophical aspect of this preference. Because humans cannot …

The Inevitability Of The Eclectic: Liberating Adr From Ideology, Jeffrey W. Stempel

Scholarly Works

The problem with viewing facilitation as the only legitimate form of mediation, of course, is that it borders on tautology: mediation is nonevaluative, therefore any evaluation in mediation must be impermissible. Although this view remains strongly held in many quarters, it appears to be in retreat, both within the mediation community and in the legal community at large. Courts and commentators have shown increasing favor toward some evaluative or advising component of mediation. More important, the eclectic style appears to be what takes place in the metaphorical trenches of mediation practice (although sound empirical data is necessarily hard to obtain …