Recently, the topic of whether mediators should draft settlement agreements arose in my mediation ethics class. I suggested that if the parties have attorneys, the mediator should encourage the attorneys to draft the agreement. A student took issue stating that then the mediator loses “control”. I disagreed noting that the [Read More]
Every day we read and/or see news of how climate change has affected or is impacting our daily lives. Well- an article in Live Science suggests that heat may cause us to be more aggressive (if not sleepy!) In an article published in early September 2023 entitled “Hot Weather could [Read More]
Once again, I am teaching mediation ethics to graduate students at the Gould School of Law at the University of Southern California. Over the last couple of weeks, we have been focusing on “informed consent.” Standard I of the Model Standards of Conduct for Mediators covers self-determination and mandates that [Read More]
Many decades ago, when I was in law school, I learned about the “ripeness doctrine” in my Constitutional law course. Simply stated, this doctrine limits the power of a federal court to adjudicate cases that might otherwise fall within its jurisdiction. It concerns ““the timing of judicial intervention and prevents [Read More]
A recent blog post (dated August 21,2023) by the staff at Harvard’s PONS (Program on Negotiation) concludes that while sincere anger may be advantageous in a negotiation, appearing to be happy may or may not be disadvantageous in a negotiation: …When we display anger, our counterparts tend to view us [Read More]
In my practice of mediation, I never gave this question any thought! But I should. I just finished reading a book entitled Quiet by Susan Cain (Broadway Books, New York 2013) and realized that our answer to this question greatly impacts absolutely everything we do in life (including negotiating disputes!) [Read More]
A colleague of mine- Jan Frankl Shau, Esq.-recently published an article in the Los Angeles Daily Journal entitled “ A New paradigm for mediation: the role of “bearing witness” (July 28, 2023). In it, she notes that sometimes the job of the mediator is simply to “bear witness” or simply [Read More]
In social psychology, there is a cognitive bias known as “naïve realism” which “is the human tendency to believe that we see the world around us objectively, and that people who disagree with us must be uninformed, irrational, or biased.” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Na%C3%AFve_realism_(psychology) That is, they are idiots. Which brings me to the book I [Read More]
