Dispute Resolution and Arbitration Commons^™

How Law Schools Can Better Cultivate A Culture Of Engagement And Dialogue, Anton Sorkin

Pepperdine Dispute Resolution Law Journal

For the last few years, a competing culture has developed on university campuses based on what the National Jurist called the “protest generation.” These developments have seeped into law schools, creating not only tensions with the administrations, but also tensions between student organizations seeking to participate in accordance with their mission and purpose. Given the importance of legal education and the role of attorneys in society, this article advocates for law schools to cultivate a culture of engagement and dialogue by establishing private forums where student leaders may work out their differences in a civil and constructive manner. Within these …

Reimagining Legal Education: The Transformative Power Of Small-Group Instruction, Michael I. Meyerson

Seattle University Law Review

Legal education is failing its students. Those entering their first year of law school have greater anxiety and less developed reading and writing skills than ever before. The traditional large Socratic class, which was never the most effective teaching method, has become increasingly counterproductive.

This Article contends that small-group instruction provides the opportunity for superior teaching, especially for first-year law students. Recent scholarship in active learning, educational psychology, and students’ mental health demonstrates the limitations of the traditional large Socratic class experience. Building on that theoretical foundation and informed by sustained classroom experience, this Article argues that small-group pedagogy more …

Maurice Q. Robinson ’09 Honored At 16th Annual Ballsa Celebration, Benjamin N. Cardozo School Of Law

Cardozo Law News Archive

Cardozo School of Law honored alumnus Maurice Q. Robinson ('09) at the 16th Annual BALLSA Celebration for his leadership, service, and commitment to mentoring students and strengthening the law school's alumni community. The event also recognized recipients of the BALLSA Scholarship and celebrated the contributions of Cardozo's affinity groups.

Kwanza Jones & José E. Feliciano Commit $6 Million To Name Clinical Education Program At Cardozo School Of Law, Benjamin N. Cardozo School Of Law

Cardozo Law News Archive

Cardozo School of Law announced a $6 million gift from alumna Kwanza Jones and José E. Feliciano to renovate and expand its clinical education facilities. The gift will establish the Kwanza Jones and José E. Feliciano Program for Clinical Education, supporting experiential legal education and increasing access to justice through Cardozo's nationally recognized clinical programs.

The Art Of Ai Prompting In Law And Dispute Resolution Practice, John Lande

Faculty Publications

This short article offers a practical guide for using AI tools to improve the judgment and efficiency of lawyers, mediators, and arbitrators.  It cites ABA Ethics Opinion 512, which describes lawyers’ ethical duty of technological competence under the ABA Model Rules.

The article encourages practitioners to begin by selecting AI tools appropriate to their tasks such as general-purpose platforms or specialized tools listed in the article.  It explains how to write effective prompts, use follow-up questions to refine outputs, and apply professional judgment when reviewing results.  It includes a list of suggested follow-up prompts.

Getting useful results from AI tools …

How Mediators And Lawyers Can Use Ai: A Practical Video Guide, John Lande

Faculty Publications

This article explains why mediators and lawyers increasingly need to use artificial intelligence (AI) tools in their work.  It introduces a video that offers practical guidance for mediators and lawyers on using AI to enhance planning, help clients make better decisions, and improve efficiency.  It includes a basic introduction to AI, guidance on getting good results and managing risks, and demonstrations of RPS Coach, a specialized AI tool.  The article provides links to the video, PowerPoint slides, and a transcript of the demonstrations.

Promoting Better Dispute Decision-Making With An Ai Tool Built On Rps Theory, John Lande

Faculty Publications

Traditional theories of negotiation and mediation rely on rigid models, false dichotomies, and confusing terminology that fails to reflect the complexity of real practice. This article critiques those theories and introduces Real Practice Systems (RPS) theory as a more accurate and practical alternative.

RPS theory conceptualizes negotiation and mediation as sequences of professional judgment shaped by context, experience, and goals, rather than as idealized or linear processes. It promotes a realistic and ethically responsible practice by encouraging reflection, intentional process design, and adaptability.

The article introduces “RPS Coach,” a free artificial intelligence tool built on the ChatGPT platform. It is …

Thinking Like Mediators About The Future Of Ai, John Lande

Faculty Publications

Some public discourse about artificial intelligence (AI) reflects the uncertainty and tension typical of high-stakes conflicts, where differing perceptions and strong emotions shape how people respond to change. This short essay suggests that dispute resolution professionals are well-positioned to apply our tools to this emerging and complex issue, though we don’t always do so.

The essay calls for a balanced analysis of AI’s risks and benefits, drawing on familiar dispute resolution practices like careful consideration of situations, interests, and options. It highlights the differences between individual and societal impacts of AI use on the environment and education. It encourages the …

Responsible Realism About Artificial Intelligence: How Ai Is Shaping Legal And Dispute Resolution Practice, Education, And Scholarship, John Lande

Faculty Publications

This article synthesizes the views of legal scholars examining how generative artificial intelligence (AI) is affecting legal and dispute resolution practice, education, and scholarship. They share a perspective of responsible realism – recognizing both the promise and the perils of AI. It is already reshaping how lawyers, neutrals, educators, students, and scholars work – and its influence will only grow.

The scholars identify clear benefits: broader access, greater efficiency, and new support for professional learning. They also warn of serious risks, including bias, deskilling, and erosion of judgment. Avoiding both hype and panic, they analyze developments, offer realistic strategies, and …

Training Humanoids To Use Good Dispute Resolution Language, John Lande

Faculty Publications

This short essay uses satire to spotlight the entrenched, misleading terminology widely used in the dispute resolution field, especially in legal and academic settings. Drawing on metaphors of humanoids, bots, and malware, it critiques outdated jargon like “facilitative” and “evaluative” mediation and proposes clearer alternatives derived from Real Practice Systems theory. It describes efforts to train an AI tool, the RPS Negotiation and Mediation Coach, to model improved language use and nudge human users toward better decision-making. Though light in tone, it reflects a serious commitment to reforming the way we talk about and practice negotiation and mediation.

The Art Of Mediation Representation: Helping Clients Make Good Decisions, John Lande

Faculty Publications

Attorneys regularly represent clients in mediation, yet many do not perform this role effectively. The article is designed to help attorneys better assist clients in making good decisions during mediation. It explores the theory and practice of mediation representation, emphasizing how attorneys can provide excellent client service by counseling clients and communicating effectively with mediators and counterpart attorneys. Ideally, attorneys as act “quasi-mediators,” helping clients make informed, confident decisions while navigating the mediation process. Drawing on the Real Practice Systems checklists and empirical research, the article outlines key tasks before, during, and after mediation sessions. It critiques the inadequate preparation …

Getting The Most From Ai Tools: A Practical Guide To Writing Effective Prompts, John Lande

Faculty Publications

This article is a companion to How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bot: What I Learned About AI and What You Can Too. This article helps users, especially those in dispute resolution roles, learn how to write effective prompts and engage productively with artificial intelligence (AI) tools. The goal is to make AI less intimidating and more useful – one good question at a time.

The article shows how users can choose appropriate tools, formulate effective prompts, and generate useful results. It offers role-specific prompt suggestions for mediators, attorneys, disputants, ADR program managers, law school faculty, …

How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bot: What I Learned About Ai And What You Can Too, John Lande

Faculty Publications

Artificial intelligence (AI) tools play an increasingly prominent role in legal education, legal practice, and dispute resolution. People’s understanding of how these tools work varies widely. This article outlines a framework to improve AI literacy among dispute resolution practitioners, parties, ADR program managers, faculty, students, and scholars. It highlights emerging trends and offers practical suggestions and resources to support AI literacy and the responsible integration of AI into their work. A companion article, Getting the Most from AI Tools: A Practical Guide to Writing Effective Prompts, helps users, especially those in dispute resolution roles, learn how to write effective …

Rps Coach Project: A Growing Library About A Valuable Ai Tool, John Lande

Faculty Publications

This document collects a growing library of publications, videos, and podcasts about the RPS Negotiation and Mediation Coach (RPS Coach), an AI tool grounded in Real Practice Systems (RPS) Theory. RPS Coach is designed to support mediators, lawyers, parties, educators, students, and scholars by promoting good decision-making and reflective practice in negotiation and mediation. This piece summarizes articles and blog posts that present the theory, knowledge base, and functions of RPS Coach, along with practical guidance for its use in dispute resolution, writing, and legal education. It includes links to each publication and will be updated as new work is …

Technology And Me And You: Getting Comfortable With Ai, John Lande

Faculty Publications

This short essay reflects on the author’s surprising dive into artificial intelligence (AI) despite his longstanding caution about adopting new technology. As a self-described tech-wary curmudgeon who avoids unnecessary upgrades and stays off social media, the author explores how AI – specifically, a custom-built RPS (Real Practice Systems) Negotiation and Mediation Coach – nonetheless has proved to be unexpectedly valuable.

Drawing from personal experience, the essay suggests how people can become comfortable using AI, suggesting how they can overcome hesitation and use AI productively. Rather than treating AI as a black box or magic solution, it emphasizes the importance of …

A Practical Guide For Using The Rps Negotiation And Mediation Coach, John Lande

Faculty Publications

This two-page guide introduces the RPS Negotiation and Mediation Coach, an AI-powered tool grounded in Real Practice Systems (RPS) theory. It explains who can use RPS Coach, how it supports good decision-making, and the range of tasks it can perform. It is designed for attorneys, mediators, parties, ADR program administrators, educators, and students to improve the quality of dispute resolution practice, program design, and legal education. Practitioners and parties can use it to prepare for, participate in, and reflect on negotiation and mediation. Faculty can use it to develop syllabi, assignments, and simulations. Users can explore ideas, generate drafts, and …

Law, Conflict, And Hybrid Warfare: A Teaching Imperative For A Changing World, Cynthia Alkon, Andrea Kupfer Schneider

Faculty Scholarship

Lawyers increasingly find themselves at the frontlines of the battlefield, just not in the traditional sense. Hybrid warfare is a conflict form that combines traditional military offensive measures with nontraditional methods, including the harnessing of legal systems to achieve strategic goals. Lawyers have always been at the frontline of typical legal risk assessment, thinking about a client's risk of liability or regulation costs generally. Now, lawyers must stand at the ready for a lot more: lawyers must be prepared for cyber-attacks, disinformation campaigns using artificial intelligence, the use of court systems to suppress reporting or shield bad actors, and so …

Creating Educational Value By Teaching Law Students To Be Quasi-Mediators, John Lande

Faculty Publications

Most mediation courses currently focus primarily on mediators’ perspectives and interventions during mediation sessions. Under the traditional view, mediators are the intervenors, and the parties, attorneys, and other participants in mediation sessions are the intervenees.

This article argues that mediation courses should provide balanced instruction of the roles of both mediators and attorneys by teaching students how to function as “quasi-mediators” when representing clients in mediation. As quasi-mediators, attorneys look for opportunities to reach reasonable agreements whenever appropriate, and they use mediation techniques to move the process in that direction. But they do not surrender their loyalty to their clients …

Incorporating Real-World Legal Practice Into Law School Curricula, John Lande

Faculty Publications

This annotated bibliography was prepared for the program, “Pracademically Speaking: Incorporating Real-World Legal Practice Into the Curriculum,” at the 2024 Annual Conference of the ABA Section of Dispute Resolution. It includes relevant entries from the Real Practice Systems Project Annotated Bibliography.

This includes three sections, identifying: (1) problems with legal education and licensing, (2) resources for law schools and faculty, and (3) resources for law students. It particularly focuses on teaching skills for helping clients, which is critically important because practitioners often fail to recognize and respect clients’ perspectives and interests. Teaching students to work well with clients – and …

Pass The Salt: Problem-Resolution Lawyering Across The Twenty-First Century Law Curriculum, Kris Franklin, F. Peter Phillips

Pepperdine Dispute Resolution Law Journal

Attorneys work with clients to resolve problems. Legal education can help prepare law graduates to do that work. As an added bonus, doing so would in turn help law students understand and retain the subjects they study. Law professors who teach alternative dispute resolution, lawyering skills, clinics, and sometimes traditional doctrinal courses, have all called for greater inclusion of dispute resolution in the law school curriculum. Some have urged the introduction of specific courses to prepare contemporary law students to work as problem resolvers. This Article builds on these and other calls for reform, but urges a genuine reconceptualization of …

Designing Interdisciplinary, Early Intervention Dispute Resolution Tools To Decrease Evictions And Increase Housing Stability, Christine N. Cimini

Articles

This Article provides a unique glimpse into the development of an early-intervention, pre-court, interdisciplinary dispute resolution project intended to decrease evictions and increase housing stability for recipients of subsidized housing in Seattle. With a grant from the Seattle Housing Authority (SHA), a coalition of non-profit organizations had the rare opportunity to design a dispute resolution system into existence. A dispute system design team was formed and began by examining the interconnected problems of housing instability, eviction, and houselessness. Despite thorough research on dispute system design and extensive meetings with stakeholders, the deign team encountered numerous challenges. This Article identifies the …

Law And Covid-19, Aurelio Gurrea-Martinez, Yihan Goh, Mark Findlay

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

This book is a collection of essays from scholars at Singapore Management University School of Law analysing the challenges and implications of COVID-19 from the perspective of different areas of law, including private law, corporate law, insolvency law, data protection, financial laws, public law, privacy law, commercial law, constitutional law, law and technology, and dispute resolution. It also analyses how the COVID-19 pandemic will affect the judicial system, the study of law, and the future of the legal profession. Beyond considerations of the pandemic’s influence on law and legal service delivery the authors consider how law can help facilitate the …

Mediation And Millennials: A Generational Shift In Dispute System Preferences, Shawna Benston, Brian Farkas

Pace Law Review

Millennials have been the subject of intense media scrutiny for more than a decade. Studies have examined their social, financial, technological, and work habits. However, few studies have examined this generation’s attitudes or proclivities towards civil litigation. Such an examination presents two problems: First, the absence of data on litigants’ age makes an empirical study virtually impossible. Second, generalizations about an entire generation are inherently problematic, glossing over countless cultural, economic, familial, and demographic differences. Nevertheless, this Article argues that millennials’ experiences and educations have primed them, at the margins, to avoid litigation more than prior generations. Instead, this generation …

What Dinosaurs Can Teach Lawyers About How To Avoid Extinction In The Odr Evolution, Elayne E. Greenberg, Noam Ebner

Faculty Publications

This paper is a wake-up call for the legal profession: Heed the justice changes that are upon us or risk extinction. Online dispute resolution (hereinafter ODR) is currently being incorporated into U.S and international court systems, re-shaping and re-defining justice as we know it today. Courts and clients, two stakeholders in our justice system, are increasingly receptive to ODR as a viable option to help provide and access justice efficiently and affordably. The legal profession, the third stakeholder in our justice system, however, has been slower to react. As ODR plays an increasingly prominent role in the court system, it …

Collaborating For Transformation, Marjorie A. Silver

Journal of Experiential Learning

No abstract provided.

Mediation, Legal Clinic Program

Course Descriptions and Information

Students will learn and develop skills crucial to the role of mediators and legal professionals. By focusing and implementing mediation methodologies, students will learn skills of active listening and communications; conflict, issue and interests spotting, information gathering and negotiations techniques; problem-solving strategies and approaches; and effective mediation settlement agreement drafting.

Law & Lawyering In The Work Place: Building Better Lawyers By Teaching Students To Exercise Critical Judgment As Creative Problem Solver, Alan M. Lerner

Akron Law Review

This article is about the evolution of that course from the earliest planning through its presentation. Hopefully, having the two of us involved in the day-to-day teaching of the course would send the message to our students that collaboration was a positive aspect of the learning and lawyering processes. Additionally, we hoped that the students would see that “academic” and “clinical” faculty are partners in their legal education.

Client Problem-Solving: Where Adr And Lawyering Skills Meet, Katherine R. Kruse, Bobbi Mcadoo, Sharon Press

Faculty Scholarship

Influenced by critiques of legal education, law schools are scrambling to offer more and better opportunities for experiential education. To fulfill the new demands for experiential education, one obvious place to turn is clinic pedagogy, which has developed methodologies for teaching students in the real-practice settings of in-house clinics and externships. As the interest in experiential education broadens, a wider spectrum of teaching methodologies comes under the experiential tent, creating opportunities to tap new sources of guidance for reshaping legal education.

This article turns the spotlight on one of these other, less obvious resources within legal education: the alternative dispute …

What Judges Want And Need: User-Friendly Foundations For Effective Judicial Education, Duane Benton, Jennifer A.L. Sheldon-Sherman

Journal of Dispute Resolution

This article evaluates the connection between judicial education and judges’ needs and preferences. In Part I, we begin by discussing the history, purpose, and form of judicial education, charting its evolution over time. In Part II, we examine current judicial education programs and scholarship, highlighting differences and similarities between federal and state programming. In Part III, we analyze the limitations of existing scholarship and programming, arguing judicial education programs are insufficiently tied to evidence of judicial demands. We conclude in Parts IV and V by suggesting two proposals to align programming with needs: (1) an annual needs-based assessment of judicial …

Judicial Education: Pedagogy For A Change, T. Brettel Dawson

Journal of Dispute Resolution

Canadian judges have maintained a steadfast, long-term commitment to judicial education. Through teaching one another, judges renew their vision over time, and more concretely, address their concerns and challenges today. Since its inception in 1985, the National Judicial Institute (NJI) has sought to be a partner and a resource to judges and Courts in a shared endeavour to create relevant, practical, and effective judicial education. Working together, the NJI, judges, and Courts have built a “Canadian model” of judicial education widely respected and emulated.