Dispute Resolution and Arbitration Commons^™

Medical Malpractice Arbitration: Not Business As Usual, David Larson, David Dahl

Faculty Scholarship

There is an interesting exception to businesses’, employers’, and service providers’ seemingly universal embrace of arbitration processes, particularly mandatory pre-dispute arbitration. Although it may be difficult to believe given arbitration’s current popularity, not everyone requires his or her clients to sign mandatory pre-dispute arbitration agreements. In fact, some service providers prefer to avoid arbitration regardless of whether it is arranged pre- or post-dispute. So which merchants or service providers are choosing to forgo arbitration and, more importantly, why do they dislike arbitration? And do politics have anything to with their choices? Physicians are not, shall we say, the world’s greatest …

A Turning Point For The Mediation Profession – Or A Slippery Slope?, Nadja Alexander

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

In this post on the Kluwer Mediation Blog, issues affecting practitioners in the mediation profession are explored.

The State Courts Centre For Dispute Resolution: Serving The Society With Quality Dispute Resolution Services, Dorcas Quek Anderson

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

Court Alternative Dispute Resolution (“ADR”) has its origins in a 1994 pilot project in the Subordinate Courts (as it was known then) to have selected District Judges assist in resolving civil disputes using ADR processes. Within two decades, Court ADR has been extended to the entire gamut of cases filed in court, including civil claims, minor criminal offences and family disputes. Court ADR services, which have been known as “Court Dispute Resolution”, have become integral to the delivery of justice in the State Courts. As the Honourable The Chief Justice Sundaresh Menon has observed, ADR has been promoted as the …

An Innovative Matrix For Dispute Resolution: The Dubai World Tribunal And The Global Insolvency Crisis, Jayanth K. Krishnan, Harold Koster

Articles by Maurer Faculty

This study examines a legal experiment that occurred during the height of the global financial crisis. As markets from the United States to Europe to the Global South shook, one country – the United Arab Emirates – found itself on the brink of economic collapse. In particular, in 2009 the U.A.E’s Emirate of Dubai was contemplating defaulting on $60 billion of debt it had amassed. Recognizing that such a default would have cataclysmic reverberations across the globe, Dubai’s governmental leaders turned to a small group of foreign lawyers, judges, accountants, and business consultants for assistance. Working in a coordinated fashion, …

...Because It’S Not Just About Money, Elayne E. Greenberg

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

When lawyers represent their clients in party-decided dispute resolution processes such as negotiation or mediation, lawyers have a unique opportunity to work with their clients to help shape a comprehensive settlement beyond just a monetary settlement. This is an opportunity to address the client’s human and core concerns and to help their client secure their personalized sense of justice. However, lawyers and mediators who myopically seek to resolve every legal conflict by just monetary resolution are akin to the carpenter who sees everything as a nail because the only tool available is a hammer. This column invites you to …

The Power Of Empathy, Elayne E. Greenberg

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

As colleagues in the dispute resolution field, we have likely participated in the ongoing, often heated debate about the role, if any, of empathy in dispute resolution. There are those colleagues who believe that empathy will only muck up what is really important, the bottom-line number and your evaluation about how to get there. On the other side of this controversy, there are seasoned colleagues who regularly use empathy as dispute resolution currency, often at the risk of being marginalized as “touchy feely” by those who don’t understand its value. To help us get past each other’s anecdotal justifications …

Nelson Mandela As Negotiator: What Can We Learn From Him?, Harold I. Abramson

Scholarly Works

This article considers how “the greatest negotiator of the twentieth century,” Nelson Mandela, approached negotiating the unbanning of the African National Congress (ANC), the dismantling of apartheid, and his own freedom after twenty-seven years of imprisonment. He employed classically good negotiation practices in the face of intense and violent opposition while confined in prison for life. If he could be successful, why cannot lawyers succeed when facing less daunting disputes?

This article focuses on the period starting in 1985, when Mandela refused an offer to be released if he would condemn violence, until 1990, when President de Klerk gave his …

Ancient And Comely Order: The Use And Disuse Of Arbitration By New York Quakers, F. Peter Philips

Articles & Chapters

From the late 17th century, the Religious Society of Friends (“Quakers”) observed a method of resolving disputes arising within congregations that was scripturally based, and culminated in final and binding arbitration. The practice of Quaker arbitration gradually disappeared during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and few modern Quakers are even aware of it. This article traces that decline and notes similarities with mercantile arbitration. In both religious and mercantile arbitration, a defined community valued the goal of avoiding group disruption more than the goal of vindicating individual legal rights. In both cases, members of the community applied distinct …

The Wto Dispute Settlement System 1995-2016: A Data Set And Its Descriptive Statistics, Louise Johannesson, Petros C. Mavroidis

Faculty Scholarship

In this paper, we provide some descriptive statistics of the first twenty years of the WTO (World Trade Organization) dispute settlement that we have extracted from the data set that we have put together, and made publicly available.

The statistical information that we present here is divided into three thematic units: the statutory and de facto duration of each stage of the process, paying particular attention to the eventual conclusion of litigation; the identity and participation in the process of the various institutional players, that is, not only complainants and defendants, but also third parties, as well as the WTO …

The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight: The Not So Magnificent Seven Of The Wto Appellate Body, Petros C. Mavroidis

Faculty Scholarship

The WTO Appellate Body (AB) has produced a volume-wise important body of case law, which is often difficult to penetrate, never mind classify. Howse (2016) has attempted a very lucid taxonomy of the case law using the standard of review as benchmark for it. His conclusion is that the AB is quite cautious when facing nondiscriminatory measures, especially measures relating to the protection of human life and health, while it has adopted a more intrusive (into national sovereignty) standard when dealing with trade measures (like antidumping), which are by definition discriminatory as they concern imports only. In my response, I …

Ask For The Moon, Settle For The Stars: What Is A Reasonable Period To Comply With Wto Awards?, Petros C. Mavroidis, Niall Meagher, Thomas J. Prusa, Tatiana Yanguas

Faculty Scholarship

The World Trade Organization (WTO) dispute settlement process allows a defending Member a “reasonable period of time” (RPT) to implement any findings that its contested measures are inconsistent with WTO law. If agreement on this RPT cannot be reached, Article 21.3(c) of the Understanding on Rules and Procedures Governing the Settlement of Disputes (DSU) provides for the possibility of arbitration on the length of the RPT. The DSU provides limited guidelines on the RPT, stating only that it should not normally exceed 15 months. In practice, Arbitrators have developed the standard that the RPT should reflect the shortest possible period …

Dispute Settlement In The Wto: Mind Over Matter, Petros C. Mavroidis

Faculty Scholarship

The basic point I advocate in this paper is that the WTO Dispute Settlement System aims to curb unilateralism. No sanctions can be imposed, unless if the arbitration process is through, the purpose of which is to ensure that reciprocal commitments entered should not be unilaterally undone through the commission of illegalities. There are good reasons though, to doubt whether practice guarantees full reciprocity. The insistence on calculating remedies prospectively, and not as of the date when an illegality has been committed, and the ensuing losses for everybody that could or could not be symmetric, lend support to the claim …

Military Activities In The Unclos Compulsory Dispute Settlement System: Implications Of The South China Sea Arbitration For U.S. Ratification Of Unclos, Lori Fisler Damrosch

Faculty Scholarship

The Award on the Merits in the South China Sea Arbitration between the Philippines and China (Award) is the first decision of any tribunal to interpret the provision of the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (Convention or UNCLOS) that allows states parties to exclude disputes concerning military activities from the Convention’s compulsory dispute settlement regime. That optional exclusion, embodied in Article 298(1)(b) of the Convention, was a central component of the strenuously-negotiated compromise between states that favored compulsory jurisdiction in principle and those that would have preferred a strictly optional system for third-party legal dispute …

Gateway-Schmateway: An Exchange Between George Bermann And Alan Rau, Alan Scott Rau, George Bermann

Faculty Scholarship

What role do national courts play in international arbitration? Is international arbitration an “autonomous dispute resolution process, governed primarily by non-national rules and accepted international commercial rules and practices” where the influence of national courts is merely secondary? Or, in light of the fact that “international arbitration always operates in the shadow of national courts,” is it not more accurate to say that national courts and international arbitration act in partnership? On April 27, 2015, the Pepperdine Law Review convened a group of distinguished authorities from international practice and academia to discuss these and other related issues for a symposium …

The Day Doctrine Died: Private Arbitration And The End Of Law, Myriam E. Gilles

Articles

This story begins in 1980, when a budding anti-lawsuit movement found an energetic champion in a new conservative President. Over time, the movement became a dominant feature of political life, as its narrative of activist judges, jackpot justice, and a thriving lawsuit industry stirred partisan passions. And yet, some thirty years on, it is clear that the primary legacy of the anti-lawsuit movement is the movement itself--not legislative achievements, which have been few and far between, but committed adherents, including future Supreme Court Justices, lower court judges, and business leaders.

Meanwhile, and also in the early 1980s, federal courts began …

The Role Of Language Interpretation In Providing A Quality Mediation Process, Alexandra Carter, Shawn Watts

Faculty Scholarship

This paper focuses on the role of language in mediation and the challenges multiple language fluencies bring to the practice. Beginning with a discussion of the process and ethics of mediation as a form of alternative dispute resolution, as distinct from other forms of dispute resolution including arbitration, the paper shifts to consider the importance of language. Language, and more specifically interpretation, plays a central role in the integrity of the mediation process and the quality of its outcomes. Each stage of mediation requires the participants and the mediator understand one another to ensure effective communication and a quality process. …