From New York, an interesting institutional approach to small-stakes dispute resolution: the Office of Administrative Trials and Hearings (OATH).According to the article, OATH was created in 1979 as an “independent alternative” to internal agency tribunals.
I’ve handled any number of mediations where the parties and counsel view prospects for settlement with optimism. Lately, I’m seeing more and more pre-mediation conferences being held in complicated cases or cases where the prospects of settlement seem less likely.
I love the ABA Section of Dispute Resolution annual conferences. They always put on a wide array of wonderful sessions and it’s a great time to connect with friends, old and new. As in the past, I am listing some sessions that particularly intrigue me.
Peter Joy (Washinton University School of Law) has published “The Uneasy History of Experiential Education in U.S. Law Schools,” forthcoming in the Dickinson Law Review and available here. The abstract: This article explores the history of legal education, particularly the rise of experiential learning and its importance.
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.