Jennifer’s work on empathy is fantastic and she continues that line of schlolarship w/  the piece.  Essentially she says that when addressing value-based problems, empathy is critical.  The paper discusses how to teach empathy (yes, it can be done).  Jen in conjunction with Larry Susskind have developed roleplays doing this (available at the Harvard PON) and this paper discusses her experience doing this. 

The commenters enjoyed the piece, a sampling:

• Values and identity are everywhere when we’re searching for interests.
• Inviting students to engage in dialogue/facilitation in the context of mediation in these contexts helps students w/ their cognitive understandings so they can see and describe others’ points of view.
• Teaching relational competencies are important in law school b/c the law is all about relationships and relationships gone awry – understanding others is critical.
• Empathizing with perceived horrible people (awful clients, awful opposing counsel, opposing client) is very difficult.
• Include the transfer of training literature, mostly in a business context, because what we’re hoping for is that our students will be able to do this further down the road.
• Having students act “against type” is a great idea, but having students do it well can be problematic – hard to imagine how others will feel, perspective taking can exacerbate the differences and this can be particularly difficult in the values based problems
• What’s the best way to set these up role-plays – this paper can be a great resource for not only the pedagogy, but also how to make it so the pedagogy succeeds.