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…
HNMCP publishes a second guide in the “From the Field” series
HNMCP is excited to launch the second publication in our “From the Field” guide series: “From the Field: A Restorative Justice Guide.” The Restorative Justice Guide, written by Clinical Instructor and Lecturer on Law Deanna Pantín Parrish, brings together learnings and insights that have emerged from our projects in the Dispute Systems Design Clinic, as well…
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…
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…
HNMCP Launching “From the Field” Guides Based on Learnings Over 15 Years of Dispute Resolution Projects
We are thrilled to launch “From the Field,” a new set of freely accessible, public guides. This guide series seeks to bring together learnings and insights from HNMCP’s clinical projects since its founding in 2006. The content of each of these guides reflects themes that have recurred across projects in a particular arena of dispute…
Tech Disruption: An Interview with HNMCP Clinical Fellow Oladeji Tiamiyu
Technology-driven change is coming to our community so the more dialogue we have, the more likely we can avoid harmful outputs while still harnessing the benefits.
HNMCP and the American Bar Association Jointly Release Report on Best Practices for Eviction Diversion: “Designing for Housing Stability”
A major new report jointly released today by the Harvard Negotiation and Mediation Clinical Program and the American Bar Association identifies a list of key considerations for designing court-based and court-adjacent eviction prevention and/or diversion programs. The report, Designing for Housing Stability: Best Practices for Court-Based and Court-Adjacent Eviction Prevention and/or Diversion Programs, was written…
Client Spotlight – Jane Juliano and the U.S. Office of Special Counsel
Over the past 15 years, the Harvard Negotiation and Mediation Clinical Program (HNMCP) has worked with over a hundred client organizations. Within this group, the U.S. Office of Special Counsel (OSC) stands out as one of our longest continuous partnerships, with half a dozen projects spanning from spring 2012 through spring 2020.* In this client…
A Year of Pandemic Mediation—Online Lessons Learned at the Harvard Mediation Program
By Peter Daniels ʼ21 As the world has adjusted to restrictions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, the Harvard Mediation Program (HMP) has changed along with it. Boston-area courts have shifted to remote hearings for many case types, pushing mediation to be remote as well. HMP has been in the fortunate position to help lead…
Adapting to the Virtual World: Teaching Negotiation to High School Students Online
By Kate Strickland ’23, Colin Mark ’22, Lorea Mendiguren ’23, and Anselmo Cassiano In a year that forced the world online, a team from the student practice organization Harvard Law School Negotiators worked throughout the year to transform an existing project to teach high school students the principles of negotiation and active listening into a virtual learning format. For multiple years, the HLS Negotiators has had a recurring relationship…
Student Spotlight: Patrick Maxwell ʼ21
Patrick Maxwell is a dual-degree candidate for his JD at Harvard Law School and his MA in Law and Diplomacy at The Fletcher School at Tufts University. We first met Patrick as a client in the spring of 2016 when we did a project in the Democratic Republic of Congo with the Mennonite Central Committee. Two-and-a-half years later, we welcomed Patrick as…
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…
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 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…
Dispute Systems Design Info Session for HLS Students
This information session brought together current Dispute Systems Design Clinic students—to talk about the skills they’ve harvested from working with real-world clients through the clinic—as well as alums, who reflect on how their clinic experience helped them discern and inform their professional path and work in the world. This info session was held for Harvard…
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…