Harvard Negotiation Law Review

  • Home
  • Scholarly Articles
    • Articles
    • HNLR Online Articles
  • Submissions Information for Authors
  • Student Note Competition
    • 2022 – 2023 Student Note Competition
    • 2020-2021 Student Note Competition Winner
  • Symposiums
    • Symposium 2022
    • Symposium 2020
    • Symposium 2019
    • Symposium 2017 (Fall)
    • Symposium 2017 (Spring)
    • Symposium 2016
    • Symposium 2015
    • Symposium 2014
    • Symposium 2013
    • Symposium 2012
    • Symposium 2011
    • Symposium 2010
  • Contact
  • Executive Board
  • Subscriptions
  • Join HNLR – Spring 2023 Subcite

Collaborative Law — A New Choice for Divorcing Families

When a family is divorcing, they can choose to go the typical route–litigation–or an increasingly common alternative–mediation.  In addition to those more traditional choices, couples now have the option of what’s been come to be known as the “collaborative process.”

In the collaborative law model (also known as Collaborative Practice), each client hires a collaboratively-trained attorney.  Clients and their attorneys sit down together for four-way meetings structured with the goals of fair dealing and transparent negotiating. The parties and their attorneys articulate the underlying goals and interests of the divorcing parties and strive to reach those goals in order to create a fair and reasonable separation agreement.

There are several keys, in my view, to a successful collaborative law situation. Together, all of these requirements comprise the total “collaborative commitment.”

[Read more…]

Reporting on Palin: Negotiations in Political Theater

By Erin Ryan

Ever since Sarah Palin’s selection as John McCain’s vice presidential running mate, the McCain campaign has engaged in a cut-throat, high-stakes negotiation with a uniquely hamstrung counterpart—the news media. Or at least, that’s how it would appear to a skilled negotiator, given the unmistakable hard bargaining tactics the campaign has regularly employed. Extreme demands, psychological warfare, bluffing, stonewalling—each day yields another expert recitation of classic bargaining tactics that you might expect to encounter while shopping for a used car, though not so much in an election that should epitomize our civic ideal of consensus-building in the marketplace of ideas. But here we-the-people are, stuck on the seamy sidelines of a used car lot, watching the campaign and the press throw down.

It’s not your standard wheeling and dealing, to be sure, but it’s a negotiation nonetheless. What are they bargaining over? Like all negotiations, it’s about what the parties want from one another. The press wants a good story, of course, within the bounds of maintaining public credibility. The campaign wants favorable press coverage for its candidates, hoping to generate public credibility of its own. So it has been since campaigning began. But in this election, the McCain campaign has perfected a slowly developing twist in the game, pursuing a new bargaining strategy with ruthless message discipline at the expense of credibility for all involved. The campaign would still like favorable press coverage for its vice presidential candidate, of course, but if it can’t have that, its secondary aspiration is to undercut the legitimacy of what unfavorable coverage it receives—and with it, the legitimacy of the news media in general. Since Palin’s debut, the campaign has chased this second goal with even greater vigor than the first, leaving us to wonder whether it is not the second-best thing at all, but what the campaign really wanted to begin with. (Witness the artistically orchestrated spectacle during the convention, in which the speakers rallied tens of thousands of delegates to boo the members of the media among them covering the event for the tens of millions of viewers watching it all happen on live TV.)

[Read more…]

  • « Previous Page
  • 1
  • …
  • 7
  • 8
  • 9

Recent Online Articles

  • Addressing Domestic Violence in Mediation: The Need for More Uniformity and Research
  • What Are We Learning About Convening Peace in a Pandemic?: Authors Lisa Dicker and Danae Paterson Reflect on their Spring 2020 Article
  • Forced into Employment Arbitration? Sexual Harassment Victims are Saying #MeToo and Beginning to Fight Back—But They Need Congressional Help
  • How Litigation Funders Have Improved the Quality of Settlements in America
  • “Behind-the-Table” Conflicts in the Failed Negotiation for a Referendum for the Independence of Catalonia: A Student Note by Oriol Valentí i Vidal
  • Power Imbalances in Mediation: A student note by Amrita Narine
  • “Son be a Dentist:” Restorative Justice and the Dalhousie Dental School Scandal by Annalise Acorn
  • Negotiating the Non-Negotiable: National Security & Negotiation
  • Stiffing the Arbitrators: The Problem of Nonpayment in Commercial Arbitration
  • Bargaining in the Shadow of the “Law?” — The Case of Same-Sex Divorce

Archives

  • May 2021
  • February 2021
  • August 2020
  • December 2017
  • February 2017
  • October 2015
  • April 2015
  • March 2015
  • February 2015
  • October 2014
  • March 2014
  • January 2014
  • November 2013
  • October 2013
  • September 2013
  • April 2013
  • March 2013
  • February 2013
  • December 2012
  • October 2012
  • September 2012
  • March 2012
  • February 2012
  • January 2012
  • December 2011
  • November 2011
  • November 2010
  • August 2010
  • March 2010
  • January 2010
  • December 2009
  • November 2009
  • October 2009
  • September 2009
  • July 2009
  • May 2009
  • April 2009
  • March 2009
  • February 2009
  • January 2009
  • November 2008

About HNLR

Negotiation, not adjudication, resolves most legal conflicts. However, despite the fact that dispute resolution is central to the practice of law and has become a “hot” topic in legal circles, a gap in the literature persists. “Legal negotiation” — negotiation with lawyers in the middle and legal institutions in the background — has escaped systematic analysis.

The Harvard Negotiation Law Review works to close this gap by providing a forum in which scholars from many disciplines can discuss negotiation as it relates to law and legal institutions. It is aimed specifically at lawyers and legal scholars.

OUR FLAGSHIP SPONSOR

Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School

JOIN OUR MAILING LIST FOR INFORMATION ON UPCOMING EVENTS

Follow Us

  • Facebook
  • X

Copyright © 2025 · Outreach Pro on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in