ADR on Top Five List of What Needs More Attention From Legal Academy

In a poll conducted by Brian Leiter’s Law School Reports, Alternative Dispute Resolution ranked fourth in terms of what areas of law need more attention from the legal academy in terms of more full-time faculty doing research in the area .  The full poll results can be found here.   So, blog readers, what do you think?  More writing?  More hiring?  Interesting food for thought…..  (Hat tip to Nancy Welsh for sending this along)

3 thoughts on “ADR on Top Five List of What Needs More Attention From Legal Academy”

  1. Let’s aim for more clinical hiring as you describe, Brian–and as we staff more courses focused on developing students’ skills in representing their clients in ADR procedures, we should leverage that experience with more writing (and hiring) that explores the appropriate legal and public policy relationships among the various areas of procedural law (e.g., Federal Civil Procedure, State Civil Procedure, Federal Courts, Arbitration, Mediation, Negotiation, Administrative Law, Bankruptcy Law, etc.). For example, anyone writing about (or litigating something in connection with) court-connected mandatory mediation is also exploring the appropriate legal/procedural relationship between mediation and civil procedure. The same is true for anyone writing about (or litigating in connection with) agency-connected mediation and administrative procedure. The increased attention to judicial review of arbitral awards and mediated settlement agreements similarly arises out of the need to bring coherence and logic to the relationship between these two “ADR” procedures, on one hand, and the enforcement power of the courts, on the other hand. This is a major dispute system design project for our field.

  2. More writing and more hiring would be nice! But what that probably means is more attention in the clinical context — not just to standard ‘negotiation skills’ training, but also to representation in mediation and representation in arbitration. Those are still skills sets that only the most ADR-intensive law schools (the readers of this blog!) teach.

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