In the next few weeks, my first cohort of Masters in Conflict Management students will be submitting their research dissertations. Meanwhile next year’s are beginning to think about the research…
(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…
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…
Have you ever wondered who mediators are helping? The parties, obviously! Well, not so obvious to our critics. In this blog I consider worries about mediation's approach to manifest injustice…
What is it about disputes in regulated sectors that make them suited to mediation?
Regulated sectors are ripe for disputes. Whether it’s the energy, financial or telecoms sector, there are often…
The U.K.’s decision to leave the EU and the voting in of the protectionist Donald Trump to the US presidency has drawn both the UK and the USA into the Nash Trap.
U.S. mathematician John Nash (the…
Forty-five years ago, Professor Christopher Stone published a paper entitled “Should Trees have Standing? Towards Legal Rights for Natural Objects”. [45 Southern California Law Review 450–501.] Two…
Morton Deutsch, the great social psychologist of common sense, explained the difference between competition and cooperation thus: "if you’re positively linked with another, then you sink or swim…
I (Bill) remember doing my first commercial mediation. I was 29, and in the presence of the four parties and their advisers I felt even younger. It was not lost on me that (as Suzanne Rab recently…
