About twelve months ago, I reluctantly attended a seminar in a classy hotel in London. A friend had encouraged me to go. I turned up rather late, missing the networking breakfast. I got my iPad out and got on with my emails as the speaker launched into his presentation. I was fairly sure I would…
Minor sport arbitration was heading towards rendering of an award which none of the parties would have been happy about. And then, arbitrator proposed a mediation window and asked the football coach: “OK, then… What do you really need? Surely not the small amount of money you are claiming?” After a moment of hesitation, claimant…
“An action-oriented citizenship is, first and foremost, engaged with other people in the creation of shared social spaces and in the discourse that such spaces make possible. Through participation and conversation, we reproduce our social meanings through time: that is what culture is. Squares and institutions, walkways and stadiums, these are the places where the…
Imagine you are a university lecturer, teaching courses in negotiation and mediation. Imagine you are also teaching a course in legal English for non-native speakers, which closely shadows a course in English private law, taught by a professor of law. One of the things you do in the latter class is support the students in…
Question How long it takes before your average mediation is concluded? You may have experience with the mediation process as a mediator, party, advisor, or referral. Or not, and you may simply wonder how much time is needed for a mediation process to be concluded. Theory and practice It’s interesting if we think about the…
As I have proudly published in several articles last year, Brazil has come a long way until it finally managed get its first Mediation Law into force. Find below a brief historic to remember this path: • 2004 – Start of the Judiciary Reform • 2010 – Ordinance No. 125 creates the National Judiciary Policy…
(This is a ‘letter to self’ about court ADR research sent from the American Bar Association Dispute Resolution Conference, San Francisco, April 2017.) Do Litigants Know Their Options? It’s always fascinating to come to a country where mediation is business as usual. There are some downsides to this, but the upside that immediately strikes a…
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…
It was fifty years ago at the end of May that the Beatles launched the album (or LP as it was then called) “Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” on the world – and the world was changed forever. 1967 was quite a year. It was the “Summer of Love”. Revolution was in the air…
I recently carried out New Zealand’s first empirical research on the users of commercial mediation. This is Part Three of a three-part study (Part One = the mediators, Part Two = the gatekeepers/lawyers). Getting to grips with what users think of commercial mediation is the Holy Grail for mediation professionals. Until now in New Zealand,…
