Dispute Resolution and Arbitration Commons^™

Alternative Dispute Resolution, Will Pryor

SMU Annual Texas Survey

No abstract provided.

Are Legal Disputes Just About The Money? Answers From Mediators On The Front Line, Harold I. Abramson, Bennett Picker, Bill Marsh, Birgit Sambeth Glasner, Jerry Weiss

Scholarly Works

Are most disputes in mediation just about money? That’s an old and familiar question that many lawyers still seem to reply to with an emphatic “yes.” Mediated cases are frequently viewed as a clash of binary claims, subject only to a sorting out of financial winners and losers. This popular vision was challenged by an ABA panel of experienced commercial mediators. Together they explored the opportunities for breaking out of this confining legalmold. Years of practice have taught them that many disputes are not just about money, even when money is the presenting issue.

Qui Custodiet Custodes? A Hard Look At International Arbitral Institutions, Jan Paulsson

Articles

No abstract provided.

Alternative Dispute Resolution: A Critical Reconsideration, Richard Delgado

SMU Law Review

No abstract provided.

Reconsidering Prejudice In Alternative Dispute Resolution For Black Work Matters, Michael Z. Green

SMU Law Review

In the 1985 foundational article Fairness and Formality: Minimizing the Risk of Prejudice in Alternative Dispute Resolution, Richard Delgado and his co-authors identified major concerns with the growing use of alternative dispute resolution (ADR) to resolve disputes involving people of color. The seminal findings from that article highlighted the power differentials exacerbated by informal dispute resolution, and the article contributed immediately to a surge of robust critiques of the increasing use of alternative dispute resolution for those most vulnerable in our society.

More than thirty years after the Delgado article, a community of respected and prominent ADR and discrimination …

Implicit Bias And Prejudice In Mediation, Carol Izumi

SMU Law Review

Mediators aspire and endeavor to meet their ethical duty of “neutrality” in mediation. Yet their ability to actually conduct mediations without bias, prejudice, or favoritism toward any party is extraordinarily difficult, if not impossible. Research shows that unconscious mental processes involving stereotypes and attitudes affect our judgments, perceptions, and behavior toward others. Implicit bias, the automatic association of stereotypes and attitudes with social groups, may produce discriminatory responses toward parties despite a mediator’s best efforts at creating an outwardly even-handed process. Even the most well-intentioned and egalitarian mediators must actively engage in bias reduction strategies to mitigate prejudice in mediation.

Do You Believe In Magic?: Self-Determination And Procedural Justice Meet Inequality In Court-Connected Mediation, Nancy Welsh

SMU Law Review

Proponents of the “contemporary mediation movement” promised that parties would be able to exercise self-determination as they participated in mediation. When courts began to mandate the use of mediation, commentators raised doubts about the vitality of self-determination. Though these commentators also suggested a wide variety of reforms, few of their proposals have gained widespread adoption in the courts.

Ensuring the procedural justice of mediation represents another means to ensure self-determination. If mediation provides parties with the opportunity to exercise voice, helps them demonstrate that they have considered what each other had to say, and treats them in an even-handed and …

Critical Procedure: Adr And The Justices’ “Second Wave” Constriction Of Court Access And Claim Development, Eric K. Yamamoto

SMU Law Review

Expansive alternative dispute resolution (ADR) was the centerpiece of efficiency-based procedural reforms in the 1980s and early 1990s. ADR and other reforms collectively altered the litigation landscape, at times for the better. Yet some scholars raised early questions about ADR’s effect on systemic litigation fairness and the ability of the disenfranchised to assert and maintain claims in court. Amid second wave procedural changes, commencing around the mid-2000s, a Justice Scalia-led majority significantly expanded the grasp of compelled, private, and individualized arbitration. Under the shroud of efficiency, that Court majority imposed those second wave changes by judicial fiat, bypassing formal rulemaking. …

Does Alternative Dispute Resolution Facilitate Prejudice And Bias? We Still Don’T Know, Gilat J. Bachar, Deborah R. Hensler

SMU Law Review

By the time Professor Richard Delgado and his colleagues wrote their seminal article on the risk of alternative dispute resolution (ADR) facilitating prejudice, ADR programs were well-established in the United States, supported by legislative and court mandates, private contracts, and U.S. Supreme Court decisions. Fairness and Formality: Minimizing the Risk of Prejudice in Alternative Dispute Resolution and Delgado’s subsequent review article, ADR and the Dispossessed: Recent Books About the Deformalization Movement, were cited hundreds of times by scholars and practitioners but did little to stop the movement to substitute mediation, arbitration, and other dispute resolution procedures for public adjudication. …

Contextual Analysis In Arbitration, Pat K. Chew

SMU Law Review

The arbitration process is embedded in a much larger context than the four walls in which the arbitration occurs. Exploring and studying that context—including the arbitral institution, the arbitrators, each party, the arbitration process, and the broader cultural and political environment—inform what actually occurs and to what extent one party may have inherent advantages over the other. This article illustrates this contextual analysis in two diverse settings: domestic employment arbitrations and international trade arbitrations. These analyses reveal one party’s advantages over the other, which are explained in part by market and cultural forces in which these arbitrations are embedded. Interdisciplinary, …

Do Alternative Dispute Resolution Procedures Disadvantage Women And Minorities?, Charles Craver

SMU Law Review

When different legal controversies arise, parties frequently employ alternative dispute resolution procedures to resolve them. Yet some members of ethnic minority groups and women may seek judicial proceedings out of a concern that their ethnicity or gender may undermine their ability to achieve beneficial bargaining outcomes through ADR. This article addresses the real and perceived challenges of ethnic minorities and women in ADR. It draws upon decades of research into dispute resolution bargaining processes to illustrate that most traits associated with ethnicity and gender are irrelevant today with respect to ADR. When persons are taught even minimally about the bargaining …

Dispute System Design And Bias In Dispute Resolution, Lisa Blomgren Amsler, Alexander B. Avtgis, Michael Scott Jackman

SMU Law Review

This article examines the role of mediator race and gender in perceptions of procedural justice as measure of accountability and representative bureaucracy in a national mediation program for complaints of employment discrimination at a large federal organization, the United States Postal Service. Mediation represents a forum of accountability in which employees may hold an employer accountable for violating federal law prohibiting forms of employment discrimination, in this case, race discrimination, sex discrimination, and sexual harassment. Representative bureaucracy theory suggests passive or symbolic representation when the demographics of public officials should mirror those of the public they serve. Some research suggests …

Title Page

Journal of Dispute Resolution

No abstract provided.

Moving Negotiation Theory From The Tower Of Babel Toward A World Of Mutual Understanding, John Lande

Journal of Dispute Resolution

This Article synthesizes insights from the contributors to our symposium. Illustrating the Tower of Babel-like confusion, Part II highlights challenges in even defining the nature and scope of negotiation, as well as with the widely (mis)used concepts of integrative and distributive negotiation. Part III summarizes the nature of theories and potential sources of information that might contribute to negotiation theory. Part IV identifies some fundamental challenges in developing and improving negotiation theory, including systematically flawed thinking as well as the failure to incorporate insights about fundamental changes in people and our interactions. Part V describes some negotiation frameworks growing out …

On The Forming Of Unified Field Theories, Noam Ebner

Journal of Dispute Resolution

In this Article, I will provide some reflections on these intuitive associations between the worlds of negotiation and of physics, in their searches for comprehensive explanations of the phenomena they respectively explore. While the connections between these two searches might be, at best, associative – they may still provide the negotiation field some reflective food for thought. While searching for one unifying theory underlying the forces and elements of negotiation activity, or even for theory explaining clusters of these elements, we might be well served by a clarification of the term we associatively connect with the realm of theoretical physics, …

Sharia Law And International Commercial Arbitration: The Need For An Intra-Islamic Arbitral Institution, George Khoukaz

Journal of Dispute Resolution

The goal of this Comment is to address the relationship between Middle-Eastern Islamic countries with the rest of the world from an international commercial arbitration perspective. To do that, we will first briefly address the historic sectarian divide between the two main sects in Islam—Sunna and Shia—which will allow the reader to gain a better understanding of the theoretical differences within Islam, resulting in different legal systems and competing political interests. Section II will also briefly address the modern history of both the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) and the Islamic Republic of Iran (Iran) because these two countries are …

Arbitration Clause Issues In Sharing Economy Contracts, Carissa Laughlin

Journal of Dispute Resolution

This Comment will explicate the successes and failures of sharing economy arbitration clauses, and discuss the future legal climate for companies like Airbnb and Uber. First, this Comment will give an overview of the sharing economy and its current legal implications, then it will provide an overview of arbitration clauses and their success in sharing economy contract agreements, and finally, it will evaluate the potential advantages and disadvantages of arbitration clauses in the future based on a current labor and employment suits pending against Uber.

Submission On The Draft General Comment On “State Obligations Under The Icescr In The Context Of Business Activities”, Columbia Center On Sustainable Investment

Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment Staff Publications

In January 2017 CCSI made a submission to the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, regarding its draft General Comment on “State obligations under the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights in the Context of Business Activities.” CCSI’s submission focused on: (1) host and home states’ obligations as they relate to international investment agreements (IIAs); (2) extraterritorial obligations in the context of outward investment; and (3) state obligations related to corruption issues.

In the submission, CCSI emphasized that states must ensure that existing treaties do not generate conflicts between obligations owed under IIAs and the Covenant (in …

How The Supreme Court's Misconstruction Of The Faa Has Affected Consumers, Margaret L. Moses

Faculty Publications & Other Works

Neither the drafters of the Federal Arbitration Act nor the Congress that adopted it intended for it to cover consumers or workers or displace state jurisdiction or state substantive law. The FAA was simply intended to provide a means for resolving disputes among commercial entities that might voluntarily choose to forego their rights to have their disputes settled in court, in favor of what they deemed to be a simpler and more efficient means of dispute resolution. That point, which is entirely beyond dispute, has been lost on the Supreme Court. In a series of cases over the past fifty …

Notes From A Quiet Corner: User Concerns About Reinsurance Arbitration – And Attendant Lessons For Selection Of Dispute Resolution Forums And Methods, Jeffrey W. Stempel

Scholarly Works

Arbitration between insurers and reinsurers – those who insure insurance companies – should logically run as smoothly as any arbitration process. Like the traditional commercial arbitration that drove enactment of the Federal Arbitration Act, reinsurance arbitration involves experienced actors in a confined industry in which the parties should be constructively aware of the rules, norms, customs and practices of the industry. But in spite of this, reinsurance arbitration experiences consistent problems of which the participants complain. This article reviews the complaints and exams possible solutions – including the possibility of arbitrating less and litigating more. Although these possible solutions would …