Blog

Child dressed for cold weather with sign in front of face reading Stop War In Ukraine surrounded by adults.

What does Putin Want?: Assessing Interests in the Invasion of Ukraine

by Lorea Mendiguren ’23   With Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and no indication of diplomatic progress since December, two questions are at top of mind: what happens next and what can we do? To understand what is driving the Kremlin’s actions and create space for potential resolutions, we must first identify what the Kremlin actually […]

What does Putin Want?: Assessing Interests in the Invasion of Ukraine Read More »

Negotiating the Boundaries of Acceptable Pandemic Behavior: Takeaways from Conversations with First-Year Law Students Living with Roommates in 2020-2021

Living with roommates always necessitates some degree of negotiating boundaries. Even in non-pandemic times, roommates must decide norms around cleaning common spaces, communal versus individual use of food and cookware, and playing music. The COVID-19 pandemic added additional complexity, as it brought to the forefront many of the behaviors that roommates would traditionally not need to discuss. In the face of an infectious virus, roommates’ behaviors around indoor dining, in-person socializing, and hosting guests become key topics to communicate about, discuss, and ultimately negotiate.

Negotiating the Boundaries of Acceptable Pandemic Behavior: Takeaways from Conversations with First-Year Law Students Living with Roommates in 2020-2021 Read More »

The Draw and Importance of Alternative Dispute Resolution: Perspectives from HNMCP Student Leaders

by Valerie Gutmann ’23 Part I: How I Became Involved with and Interested in Alternative Dispute Resolution at HLS The first time I heard the phrase “alternative dispute resolution” (ADR) was in the fall of 2020. I had just started at Harvard Law School (HLS) virtually, during a pandemic, and I was listening to the President

The Draw and Importance of Alternative Dispute Resolution: Perspectives from HNMCP Student Leaders Read More »

Introducing our Fall 2021 Student Bloggers

We are excited to introduce two student writers who will be contributing recurring columns to our blog this fall. Kelly Murphy ’24 and Valerie Gutmann ’23 bring a diverse range of experiences to their current work in dispute resolution.  Both trained mediators, Kelly and Valerie will offer informed and thoughtful perspectives on not only mediation, but also

Introducing our Fall 2021 Student Bloggers Read More »

Tying it All Together: Creating Purpose-Built Infrastructures to Address Inter-bubble Conflicts

By Patrick Maxwell ‘21   To wrap up this blog series, let’s think back to the first entry of this series, and the concept of “conflict resolution infrastructure” that was introduced there. Conflict resolution infrastructure is the set of processes, decision rules, specialists, and sources of truth that govern how a conflict is managed—and as

Tying it All Together: Creating Purpose-Built Infrastructures to Address Inter-bubble Conflicts Read More »

Photo by DBKing. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gloucester_MA_-_welcome_sign.jpg

When Norms Collide, Part 5: Essential Partners’ approach to inter-bubble conflict

By Patrick Maxwell    For this blog entry, I sat down with Nadiya Brock. Nadiya is an Associate at Essential Partners—a Cambridge-based organization that equips people to live and work better together in community by building trust and understanding across differences. The communities that Nadiya and Essential Partners work with often find themselves embroiled  in inter-bubble conflicts. Nadiya and I

When Norms Collide, Part 5: Essential Partners’ approach to inter-bubble conflict Read More »

When Norms Collide, Part 4: Interpersonal and National Inter-Bubble Conflicts—Two Stories

By Patrick Maxwell ‘21    The next entries of this blog series will focus on examples of inter-bubble conflicts from real life—and how those conflicts came to some kind of successful resolution. In this post, we’ll examine two vignettes of inter-bubble conflict. The first example is an interpersonal conflict, returning to the world of QAnon and conspiracy theories that we first referenced

When Norms Collide, Part 4: Interpersonal and National Inter-Bubble Conflicts—Two Stories Read More »

What Makes a Negotiation Win-Win? Exploring Perspectives, Mutability, and the Limits of Value Creation – Part 2

By Zekariah McNeal ‘21   The precursor to this post began a discussion for why negotiations are understood to be win-win or win-lose. Analyzing how the pre-agreement and post-agreement perspectives of a negotiator relate to this question, the previous post suggested that determining whether a negotiation is win-win is quite a complex endeavor. Although the

What Makes a Negotiation Win-Win? Exploring Perspectives, Mutability, and the Limits of Value Creation – Part 2 Read More »

Scroll to Top