Dispute Resolution and Arbitration Commons^™

Helping Lawyers Help Clients, John M. Lande

Faculty Publications

Counseling clients about dispute resolution options is easier said than done. This article suggests a strategy to help lawyers counsel clients in choosing dispute resolution options. Perhaps the most promising approach involves using dispute systems design (DSD) procedures to establish better ways of training lawyers to counsel clients.

Getting Good Results For Clients By Building Good Working Relationships With 'Opposing Counsel', John M. Lande

Faculty Publications

Lawyers’ relationships with their “opposing counsel” make a big difference in how well they handle their cases. “Opposing counsel” often do oppose each other, sometimes quite vigorously, though they also regularly cooperate with each other. In the normal course of litigation, lawyers need to cooperate on many procedural matters. In some cases, they also cooperate to achieve their respective clients’ substantive interests. If the lawyers have a bad relationship, the case is likely to be miserable for everyone involved. If they have a good relationship, they are more likely to agree on procedural matters, exchange information informally, take reasonable negotiation …

An Empirical Analysis Of Collaborative Practice, John M. Lande

Faculty Publications

This article summarizes empirical research about Collaborative Practice, the Collaborative movement, its interaction with other parts of the dispute resolution field, and its impact on the field. It reviews studies of Collaborative Practice describing the individuals involved in Collaborative cases, how the process works, the operation of local practice groups, and the impact of Collaborative Practice on legal practice generally. Based on this analysis, it suggests an agenda for future research. Finally, it offers suggestions for constructive development of the Collaborative field.

It’S A Small World After All: Cultural Competence For Advocates In Dispute Resolution Processes, Elayne E. Greenberg

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

Cultural competence has become an ethical mandate for all neutrals and advocates who use dispute resolution. Even though conflict is a universal phenomenon, our expression and choice of how to resolve conflict is culture specific. As our world becomes increasingly smaller, and flatter, and our law practices become globalized, ethically responsible attorneys are recalibrating their ethical compass and replacing their ethnocentric lens with a culturally relative lens. Yes, even if you are a New York attorney who disavows any international practice and remains steadfastly tethered to the N.Y. Rules of Professional Conduct, you still need to be culturally competent. …

Give Peace A Chance: A Guide To Mediating Child Welfare Cases, Jennifer Baum

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

Would you like to speed up your cases, achieve more satisfying results for your clients, and cut back on needlessly polarizing motion practice? Since its introduction in the 1980s, child welfare mediation has helped attorneys do just that by facilitating resolutions in child protective disputes more quickly, less contentiously, and with more acceptance from stakeholders than its courtroom alternative, adversarial litigation.

If you've handled dependency cases for any length of time, you are already familiar with the crushing caseloads, emotional volatility, and high-stakes decision-making that are the hallmarks of child welfare litigation. In a growing number of jurisdictions, attorneys …

The Globalized Practice Of Law: Part Two - It’S A Small World After All: Cultural Competence With Your International Brethren, Elayne E. Greenberg

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

Globalization is a “force majeure” that is growing and shaping the practice of law. As increasing numbers of New York lawyers represent clients in transnational and cross-border matters, many New York attorneys are welcoming the enriching perspectives that their international brethren bring to deal making and dispute resolution. However, culturally competent lawyers are also cognizant of how the different and sometimes disparate ethical obligations and values held by their colleagues from civil law countries are influencing and, at times, complicating their dispute resolution efforts. In the previous column, I discussed how our perceptions, communications and preferential modes for resolving …

Before You Take A Collaborative Law Case, John M. Lande

Faculty Publications

Under the Model Rules of Professional Conduct, lawyers have a duty to screen potential Collaborative Law (CL) cases for appropriateness and obtain clients' informed consent to use CL. The duty to screen cases is based on the "reasonableness" requirement of Rule 1.2(c) and the requirement to avoid conflicts of interest that might interfere with competent and diligent representation under Rule 1.7. Both rules require lawyers to obtain clients' informed consent to participate in a CL process. Although the Uniform Collaborative Law Act is not an ethical rule, sections 14 and 15 create relevant duties, including detailed provisions requiring lawyers to …

Helping Good Lawyers Help Clients Make Good Decisions About Dispute Resolution, John M. Lande

Faculty Publications

Counseling clients about dispute resolution options is easier said than done. These can be complex and difficult decisions, and lawyers may not have appropriate resources to help lawyers counsel clients in choosing dispute resolution options. While establishing rules requiring this kind of training may help to remedy this shortcoming, perhaps the most promising involves using dispute systems design (DSD) procedures to establish better ways of training lawyers to counsel clients.

Private Transfer Fee Covenants: Cleaning Up The Mess, R. Wilson Freyermuth

Faculty Publications

The purposes for creating a "private transfer fee" covenant range from supporting community services to creating a future revenue stream for the developer. Traditionally, courts examined these covenants using the touch and concern standard. The Restatement (Third) of Property: Servitudes, however, rejects this standard. This Article discusses this new approach as it relates to private transfer fees. The author argues that private transfer fee covenants are contrary to public policy and encourages states to enact legislation limiting the enforcement of these covenants.

Legislating In The Light: Considering Empirical Data In Crafting Arbitration Reforms, Amy J. Schmitz

Faculty Publications

Consumer advocates and policymakers call for abolition of predispute arbitration clauses in consumer contracts, while proponents of arbitration claim such abolition would increase companies’ dispute resolution costs, leading to higher prices and interest rates. Policymakers on both sides of the debate, however, rarely consider the empirical research necessary for crafting informed arbitration disclosure rules. This article therefore focuses on how varied research, including my own empirical studies, may inform policies regarding arbitration disclosure regulations. The article also offers suggestions for regulations tailored to have the most impact for the cost in light of this research.

Adr And The Rule Of Law: Making The Connection, Richard C. Reuben

Faculty Publications

In this article, I will address important definitional questions and try to articulate why it is important for practitioners, program managers, scholars, judges, and others involved in ADR to engage questions about the relationship between ADR and the rule of law.

The Restrictive Ethos In Civil Procedure, A. Benjamin Spencer

Faculty Publications

Those of us who study civil procedure are familiar with the notion that federal civil procedure under the 1938 Rules was generally characterized by a "liberal ethos," meaning that it was originally designed to promote open access to the courts and to facilitate a resolution of disputes on the merits. Most of us are also aware of the fact that the reality of procedure is not always access-promoting or fixated on merits- based resolutions as a priority. Indeed, I would say that a "restrictive ethos" prevails in procedure today, with many rules being developed, interpreted, and applied in a manner …

The Potential Contribution Of Adr To An Integrated Curriculum: Preparing Law Students For Real World Lawyering, John M. Lande, Jean R. Sternlight

Faculty Publications

This Article briefly reviews the long history of critiques of legal education that highlight the failure to adequately prepare students for what they will and should do as attorneys. It takes a sober look at the hurdles reformers face when trying to make significant curricular changes and proposes a modest menu of reforms that interested faculty and law schools can largely achieve without investing substantial additional resources.This Article emphasizes the special contributions that alternative dispute resolution (ADR) can provide to legal education more generally. ADR instruction is an important corrective to a curriculum that routinely conveys the erroneous implication that …

Foreclosure By Arbitration?, R. Wilson Freyermuth

Faculty Publications

The recession and the drastic decline in home values have combined to trigger a wave of foreclosures. Predictably, legislators, policymakers, scholars, and consumer advocates have responded with a wide range of proposals designed to protect distressed mortgagors from losing their homes.

‘Drive-Thru’ Arbitration In The Digital Age: Empowering Consumers Through Regulated Odr, Amy J. Schmitz

Faculty Publications

Online Dispute Resolution (ODR) has been promoted for quickly and conveniently resolving claims using online “drive-thru” processes instead of more costly and time-consuming face-to-face meetings and hearings. Most commentators have nonetheless focused mainly on non-binding or automated bidding processes, perhaps due in part to fairness concerns associated with off-line arbitration. This Article, however, explores the potential for online binding arbitration (OArb), and sheds new light on arbitration as means for empowering consumers to obtain remedies on their e-merchant claims. By moving arbitration online, OArb helps address concerns regarding companies’ use of arbitration clauses to curb consumers’ access to remedies on …

Beyond The Polemics: Realistic Options To Help Divorcing Families Manage Domestic Violence, Elayne E. Greenberg

Faculty Publications

Children, adult survivors, and their batterers who remain engaged in violence, even after they live apart, are living legacies of the historical perniciousness of domestic violence, a legacy that must change. True, over the past thirty years the politicization of domestic violence has raised public awareness, spurred legislative reforms, and propelled court innovations. However, the children, survivors, and batterers who still live domestic violence after divorce know all too well that all of our political advancements, legal victories, court innovations, and social awareness have not stopped the violence they live within their day-to-day lives. For many of these families, an …

Should There Be A Rule Compelling Adr? Follow The Road Where A Thousand Flowers May Grow, Elayne E. Greenberg

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

"One day Alice came to a fork in the road and saw a Cheshire cat in a tree. 'Which road do I take?' she asked. 'Where do you want to go?' 'I don’t know,' Alice answered. 'Then,' said the cat, 'it doesn’t matter.'" So too, in 1994 NYS reached the proverbial fork in road as our state continued its foray into dispute resolution. Which road should New York State proceed down to promote the development of ADR in our state? Should New York State adopt a mandatory rule compelling ADR or should New York State embrace a more voluntary …

Two For The Price Of One Is A Costly Choice: The Ethical Issues For Lawyer-Mediators Who Consider Drafting Agreements, Elayne E. Greenberg

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

Should a lawyer who serves as a mediator for two unrepresented parties also draft the resulting agreement if both mediating parties request the lawyer to do so? On June 30, 2010, the ABA Section of Dispute Resolution Committee on Mediator Ethical Guidance (hereinafter “The Committee”) issued Ethics Opinion SODR-2010-1 “Mediator’s Duty of Care When Drafting Agreements.” This ethics opinion calls into question the blurry ethical contours between lawyering and mediation when mediating with pro se parties. In this column, I will review the Committee’s ethics opinion and then, applying the New York Rules of Professional Conduct, discuss the potential …

Dispute Resolution Lessons Gleaned From The Arrest Of Professor Gates And "The Beer Summit", Elayne E. Greenberg

Faculty Publications

America's fantasy of a post-racial society was shattered on July 16,2009, when a white police officer arrested Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates, a well-respected African-American academic, in his own home. Our historical racial fissure was widened. Once again, our thoughts were plagued with tortured images of our system of racialized law enforcement: the torture of Abner Louima, the beating of Rodney King, the killing of Amadou Diallo. Predictably, Americans became further polarized, as they simultaneously blamed and defended responses to racism.

In what was perceived by some as a dramatic and unanticipated turn of events, and perceived by others as …

Fiqh And Canons: Reflections On Islamic And Christian Jurisprudence, Mark L. Movsesian

Faculty Publications

Although American scholarship has begun to address both Christian and Islamic jurisprudence in a serious way, virtually none of the literature attempts to compare the place of law in these two world religions. This Essay begins to compare Islamic and Christian conceptions of law and suggests some implications for contemporary debates about religious dispute settlement. Islam and Christianity are subtle and complex religions. Each has competing strands; each has evolved over millennia and expressed itself differently over time. Moreover, although systematic treatments of Islamic law are beginning to appear in English, much remains available only in languages, like Arabic, that …

Collaborative Lawyers' Duties To Screen The Appropriateness Of Collaborative Law And Obtain Clients' Informed Consent To Use Collaborative Law, John M. Lande, Forrest Steven Mosten

Faculty Publications

Collaborative Law (CL) is an innovative dispute resolution process that offers significant benefits but also poses significant non-obvious risks. This Article provides a systematic analysis of these possible risks as identified in books written by CL experts, CL practice group websites, social science research, and bar association ethics opinions. In CL, the lawyers and clients sign a "participation agreement" promising to use an interest-based approach to negotiation and fully disclose all relevant information. A key element of CL is the "disqualification agreement" signed by parties (and sometimes by attorneys) which provides that both CL lawyers would be disqualified from representing …

Exempting High-Level Employees And Small Employers From Legislation Invalidating Predispute Employment Arbitration Agreements, E. Gary Spitko

Faculty Publications

On February 12, 2009, lawmakers in the U.S.House of Representatives introduced the "Arbitration Fairness Act of 2009. " This bill, if enacted, will invalidate any predispute arbitration agreement between an employer and its employee. Last year, the 110th Congress considered the narrower "Preservation of Civil Rights Protections Act of 2008, " which would have invalidated such predispute arbitration agreements if they required "arbitration of a dispute arising under" federal civil rights laws. This Article explores how best to structure any such invalidation of predispute employment arbitration agreements, both in light of the rationales for and against regulation of the employment …

The Impact Of News Coverage On Conflict: Toward Greater Understanding, Richard C. Reuben

Faculty Publications

This article develops an approach for the empirical study of the news media’s impact on the conflict that it covers. While mass communications research has studied how the news media covers conflict, it has not taken the next step of assessing the impact of that coverage. This article contends that such an inquiry is necessarily an inter-disciplinary task, and joins conflict theory with mass communications research to identify the kinds of questions that may be empirically tested to determine whether the news media is having a constructive or destructive effect on the conflict that it covers.

The Sounds Of Silence: Are U.S. Arbitrators Creating Internationally Enforceable Awards When Ordering Class Arbitration In Cases Of Contractual Silence Or Ambiguity?, S. I. Strong

Faculty Publications

This article addresses a gap in the scholarly literature by comparing interpretive methodologies used by U.S. arbitrators to those used by international arbitrators to determine whether and to what extent U.S.-based class awards are enforceable outside the United States. Since many courts and arbitrators have claimed an analogy between consolidated and class arbitration, the article also considers whether such an analogy is appropriate as a matter of law and policy to identify whether the traditional disinclination to order consolidation can or should be extended to class proceedings. This second portion of the article is applicable to both domestic class arbitrations …

Personal Autonomy And Vacatur After Hall Street, Richard C. Reuben

Faculty Publications

This article analyzes the implications of the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Hall Street Associates v. Mattel, Inc., 128 S.Ct. 1396 (2008), in which the Court said that arbitration parties may not contract for substantive judicial review of arbitration under the Federal Arbitration Act. The article contends that Hall Street Associates was rightly decided as a matter of dispute resolution process characteristics and values theory because it preserves arbitration’s central virtue of finality. It further argues that the Court’s insistence on the exclusivity of the FAA’s statutory grounds for vacatur should spell the end of the so-called “non-statutory” grounds …

Learning From Cooperative Negotiators In Wisconsin, John M. Lande

Faculty Publications

To negotiate constructively from the outset of a matter, some lawyers use a "Cooperative" process, giving parties an additional process option, especially if parties believe that mediation or Collaborative practice is not suitable. Cooperative practice offers parties the opportunity to have lawyers represent them in an interest-based process governed by a negotiation agreement-while retaining ready access to litigation if needed, without losing their lawyers as in Collaborative practice. Cooperative practice can increase interest-based negotiation in direct negotiation between lawyers, increase efficiency and satisfaction with negotiation, and influence the general legal culture to incorporate problem-solving in everyday practice more often.

The Uniform Collaborative Law Act's Contribution To Informed Client Decision Making In Choosing A Dispute Resolution Process, John M. Lande, Forrest Steven Mosten

Faculty Publications

This Article describes how lawyers can implement the requirements of the Uniform Collaborative Law Act to obtain clients’ informed consent. The Act requires lawyers to obtain clients’ informed consent before undertaking a Collaborative representation but does not specify the information that lawyers must discuss with prospective Collaborative parties. To flesh out the Act’s requirements, this Article describes how lawyers should analyze the facts and parties’ interests, screen the appropriateness of dispute resolution processes, analyze the reasonably available dispute resolution options, and discuss the Collaborative process with clients. It specifically addresses privacy issues including privilege, confidentiality, and full disclosure requirements. This …

Nonconsensual Nonbinding = Nonsensical? Reconsidering Court-Connected Arbitration Programs, Amy J. Schmitz

Faculty Publications

Policymakers have adopted programs mandating parties to submit their disputes to court connected arbitration hoping to garner efficiency benefits commonly associated with contractual Federal Arbitration Act (FAA) arbitration. Mandatory nonbinding arbitration, however, is ill-equipped for this task because it lacks the consensual core and finality of FAA arbitration. Instead, it often adds an inefficient layer to the litigation process and may harm those least able to protect themselves from coerced settlements or burdens of protracted litigation.

Research In International Commercial Arbitration: Special Skills, Special Sources, S. I. Strong

Faculty Publications

Experts agree that international commercial arbitration relies far more heavily on written advocacy than litigation does, yet very few practitioners and arbitrators have ever received any specialized training in how to research and present written arguments in this unique area of law. Newcomers to the field are particularly disadvantaged, since the legal authorities used in international commercial arbitration are unique and novices often do not know how to find certain materials, if they are even aware that these items exist. This article helps deepen the understanding of the practice of international commercial arbitration by describing how experienced international advocates and …

Introduction: Adr Meets Bankruptcy, G. Ray Warner

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

On October 2, 2009, the American Bankruptcy Institute Law Review, the Hugh L. Carey Center for Dispute Resolution, and the St. John's Institute for Bankruptcy Policy convened respected bankruptcy jurists and dispute resolution scholars to host "ADR Meets Bankruptcy: Cross-Purposes or Cross-Pollination." Bankruptcy is a dispute resolution process unlike other forms of court adjudication, both in the flexibility of the process and in the systemic goals. In many ways, bankruptcy is a form of alternative dispute resolution. Yet there has been little formal engagement between students and practitioners of bankruptcy and students and practitioners of the nominally separate …