Previous Student Bloggers

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.

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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When Norms Collide, Part 3: How Inter-Bubble Conflicts Become Politicized and Polarized—And What This Means for ADR

By Patrick Maxwell ‘21    Many of the most salient examples of inter-bubble conflicts—in a US context, at least—take the form of “culture war” issues. The opening entry in this blog series referenced an interpersonal conflict stemming from the QAnon phenomenon, and hot-button issues like abortion or climate change certainly qualify as inter-bubble conflicts. The question then arises: are inter-bubble conflicts inherently “political”? And

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When Norms Collide, Part 2 – Rights, Interests, and Power: Why Inter-Bubble Conflicts are so Hard to Resolve

by Patrick Maxwell ’21   This post is the second installment of a multi-part blog series by Patrick Maxwell, “When Norms Collide:  The (Growing?) Challenge of Inter-bubble Conflicts.”  The series will explore conflicts that cut across structures, groups, and worldviews—and what it may take to effectively navigate them. Read Part 1 here.   In the previous entry in this series, we

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What Makes a Negotiation Win-Win? Exploring Perspectives, Mutability, and the Limits of Value Creation – Part 1

by Zekariah McNeal ’21   Consider this slightly altered version of a well-known example from Getting to Yes.1 Two children are fighting over an orange, when their mother discovers them and demands that they stop. “Why do you want the orange?” she asks them both. “To make orange juice!” answers the first child. “To make a cake with the orange

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