Always on the lookout for new books on mediation, for myself and my students of conflict and mediation, every now and then I come across one which is not actually new and I wonder how I missed it and what I ever did without it. One such book is Ellen Waldman’s 2011 gem on the…
Forty-five years ago, Professor Christopher Stone published a paper entitled “Should Trees have Standing? Towards Legal Rights for Natural Objects”. [45 Southern California Law Review 450–501.] Two years later, that paper had morphed into a book of the same title, with the subtitle, “Law, morality and the Environment” (1974; 3rd ed, 2010; OUP). Stone’s objective…
In the first of a series of blogs on the business of mediation, Stephen Walker, author of Setting Up In Business As A Mediator (Bloomsbury Dec 2015), discusses whether mediation is a business at all. Is Mediation A Business? The short answer is yes, if you want it to be. But should it be? Not everybody…
Mediation is already here, and it came to stay. Each day there are more and more supporters of mediation – from legislators to public institutions, and professionals who are gaining more awareness about the potential of mediation. However, it also has a long way to go. Those who decided to start working in the field…
It’s a no brainer, right? Of course mediation should be free, then many more people would use it, it would solve the problem of court waiting lists and huge legal aid bills right? Shouldn’t it? Or should it. What does free really mean? Free for whom? These questions arise out of the current debate here…
In two earlier blog posts, I commented on the work of and risks to the Land and Water Forum in New Zealand. That there is cause to write again on this topic begins to feel like shaping up to the blog equivalent of Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: a Trilogy in Four Parts…
* The views expressed here are entirely my own! Nine years after its conception by the Law Reform Commission, a draft Mediation Law, the Mediation Bill 2017, was officially presented to the Irish parliament by the Minister for Justice this week and the debate on its provisions was thereby initiated. Rafal Morek has outlined what…
“Doubt is not a pleasant condition but certainty is an absurd one.” These words of Voltaire are as apt today as they were when he wrote them in the 18th century. I don’t know about you but this year seems to be a curious mixture where some people purport to deal in apparent certainties, which…
Raymond Williams, Resources of Hope (published posthumously in 1989), p. 118 I write and will upload this blog on the eve of my departure for Paris and the ICC’s 12th International Commercial Mediation Competition. On the ‘due date’ for this blog, I’ll be somewhere between Auckland and London. Again, it will be my huge pleasure…
The Olympics have come and gone with all of the emotion and inspiration they bring. In our recent, fully-subscribed, residential Summer School on mediation skills for leaders, we reflected on the learning from Rio. We watched a video replay of the men’s taekwondo -80kg final in which Team GB’s Lutalo Muhammad lost to his Ivory…
