Attending Harvard’s Program on Negotiation has been life and career changing for many of us – influencing careers in negotiation, mediation and coaching amongst others. ‘Getting to Yes’, first published in 1981 (and never out of print since) was the text accompanying the program, and I read it from cover to cover. I missed the…
“Humanity has outsmarted itself. With its ingenuity, this tribal ape has created a world its tribalism can’t manage. We know this…But the knowledge is not enough.” So began Martin Wolf in a recent article in the Financial Times following a meeting of the finance ministers of the G20 – one of the institutions created to improve…
While it is obvious that law is significant in legal disputes, how the law is used is not so obvious. This piece uses Oliver Wendell Holmes’s famous definition of the law as “prophecies of what the courts will do in fact,” rather than rules expressed in statutes, case law etc. It discusses two aspects of…
Conducting mediation and arbitration meetings by remote means is not new to mediators, arbitrators, and practitioners. In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, in-person meetings have been replaced with video teleconference. Remote or virtual participation in mediation sessions, arbitration hearings, and even court trials become a new normal. Founded in 2018, eBRAM International Online Dispute…
Every now and again something happens to cause me to pause and think – or re-think. Recently, I had that experience at a small ruined castle in the heart of Scotland, near a lovely country town called Edzell. Edzell Castle, visited by, among others, Mary Queen of Scots and her son, King James VI of…
Law students are probably familiar with a diagram like the one above. It arranges different ways of resolving disputes according to how much say parties have in the outcome. Much as Felstiner and colleagues (1) famously described disputes being transformed into court cases through ‘naming, blaming and claiming,’ this graphic illustrates a parallel transformation in…
On July 12, 2021 the UK Civil Justice Council published its Report on Compulsory ADR . It considered first whether parties to a civil dispute in England and Wales may be compelled to participate in an ADR process. As to this question, it will be recalled that, in the Court of Appeal decision in Halsey…
I have in previous entries (July 2012 and July 2013) written about a peer mediation initiative called the Peacemakers Conference. The purpose of the Peacemakers Conference is to teach 13-16 year olds how to resolve conflicts amicably in a workshop cum competition format. This year’s Peacemakers Conference was held from 22 to 24 June 2021….
As the pandemic evolves in our days, similarly to a great majority of countries worldwide, we need urgent and inevitable shifts in behavioral patterns and cultural paradigms in Brazil as well. An average of 80 million cases reflects a traditional approach to judicialization of everyday life issues among Brazilians and a huge burden for our…
Less than you might think, according to Sir Geoffrey Vos, the newly-appointed Master of the Rolls. The Master of the Rolls is responsible for the administration of civil justice in England & Wales. Sir Geoffrey was sworn in to this post in January 2021. He has spoken several times since then about his vision for…
