One of the issues before the Court is particularly interesting: Whether a delegation clause vesting in an arbitrator questions of arbitrability of a claim has the effect of removing from a court any power to determine whether the court has jurisdiction to grant a motion to compel arbitration.
The Supreme Court has granted certiorari to review the decision of the 1st Circuit in Oliveira v. New Prime, Inc. (No. 15-2364, May 12, 2017). One of the issues before the Court is particularly interesting: Whether a delegation clause vesting in an arbitrator questions of arbitrability of a claim has the effect of removing from a court any power to determine whether the court has jurisdiction to grant a motion to compel arbitration.
JAMS Rule 11(b) provides: “Jurisdictional and arbitrability disputes, including disputes over the formation, existence, validity, interpretation or scope of the agreement under which Arbitration is sought ? shall be submitted to and ruled on by the Arbitrator.
Mediation can be hard. Often, the parties start out a great distance apart, work towards narrowing the gap, but occasionally can’t quite straddle the gulf to come to an agreement in a single day. Last week, I gave my final lesson to my students at Pepperdine on sophisticated steps for breaking an impasse. I told them that it was a matter of both skill and faith.
I would say all of those cases were ripe for mediation at the time I was asked to mediate them. How can that be? Simple. In each case, the attorneys/parties had the right information, and a strong enough desire to settle, in order to make good decisions. Could those cases, which were further into the judicial process, have been resolved sooner? Possibly. But in retrospect, I don’t think they were ready until we mediated them.
Scholastica, the service many of us use to disseminate our articles to law reviews, recently interviewed Donna Shestowsky (UC-Davis) about her work on litigant awareness of court ADR programs. Here’s the interview in full.
Maureen Weston (Pepperdine) provides this intriguing post from the Ofer military base in Israel.
The conflict over the sacred land in the West Bank, which includes East Jerusalem, in Israel is deeply rooted and profoundly intense. This region has been under rule by the Turks in the Ottoman Empire (1517- 1917), Britain (1917-48), Jordan (1948-67), and since the Six Day War in 1967, under control by the Israeli army.
The current issue of New York Dispute Resolution Lawyer — really a very good publication of the New York State Bar Association’s Dispute Resolution Section — includes a brief article by Roy Weinstein of the economic research and consulting firm Micronomics.
Both trial and mediation require a little “time traveling”. At trial, the lawyers ask the jury to fix their gaze upon a particular moment when an event occurred that caused their client to be damaged or caused a disruption in business or their lives.
