This post comes from the island of Luzon, in the Philippines, where a team from the Corporate Social Responsibility Project of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government has worked on a film documenting the tensions between operators of two hydroelectric dams and the communities that were inundated, destroyed and displaced during the...
For many years, the New Jersey Court Rules have empowered certain judges to issue Orders of Referral to Mediation. Administered by the state's Administrative Office of the Courts, the New Jersey mediation program was way ahead of its time and has prompted tens of thousands of civil mediations. The program is about...
Thanks to Paul Lurie's remarkable list-serve, we have a draft of Tom Stipanowich's paper from the 2010 Fordham Conference, titled "Revelation and Reaction: The Struggle to Shape American Arbitration." Concentrating on two of what Stipanowich predicts with be a new "trilogy" of formative Supreme Court arbitration decisions, Stipanowich places both Stolt-Neilsen v....
Over the past years, many of us have been impressed by the limitations of both institutional dispute resolution systems (i.e., courts) and their alternatives (i.e., arbitration and mediation). At the same time, I've been increasingly drawn to examples found in certain societies whose shared spiritual beliefs have produced systems of dispute resolution that...
Fellow blogger Victoria Pynchon has been kind enough to send me a copy of her new book -- made extra-collectible by her handwritten inscription inside! She has unfortunately used a vulgarity in naming the volume, but the subtitle, The Grownups' ABCs of Conflict Resolution, gives a good sense of its...
Recently this blog featured a post about a mediated settlement agreement that was enforced because it was memorialized in a written document containing the agreement's essential terms. Here we have the obverse: A case that was decided in the same month -- July 2010 -- in which a mediated settlement agreement was held unenforceable...
A reader has brought my attention an obituary that appears in today's New York Times. Eric Schmertz died on Saturday, December 18, 2010. His life, as summarized by Dennis Hevesi for the Times, is quite a lesson for dispute resolvers....