Gini Nelson's Engaging Conflicts

Victoria Pynchon over at Settle It Now Negotiation blog has written and is asking readers to take a short survey on justice issues in negotiation and mediation here. She asks that you take it not as a mediator, but as a lawyer (if you are one), or as the client herself. She will not share your names with anyone — it is confidential. She’ll leave the survey open until the end of May.
She’s trying to learn more about what people (who are not the mediators themselves) are seeking from mediation and negotiation and how they define justice when seeking a resolution to a conflict. Do clients want procedural justice or distributive justice, more? She discusses these concepts more in this post drawing from an excellent article by Professor Lisa Blomgren Bingham When We Hold No Truths to Be Self-Evident: Truth, Belief, Trust and the Decline in Trials, from a 2006 Symposium Issue for the Journal of Dispute Resolution.
She discusses the results of the survey so far here.

A lovely title to a moving essay on literacy, on how profoundly books can change lives, yes, as can the lack of them. Roxanne Coady is an independent bookseller, owner of R.J. Julia Booksellers in Madison, Connecticut.

The annotation for the essay (called a manifesto, at the ChangeThis website) describes it thus:

49% of the adult population of the United States reads below a sixth-grade level and has dificulty navigating such common demands as reading job applications, ATM screens, and outpatient care instructions. In this evocative manifesto, Roxanne Coady calls for change and suggests how you can improve the lives of others through promoting literacy in your community.

That’s the “bare” description — it’s more than that, truly moving, at least to those of us who also grew up loving reading and finding so much of value in the worlds opened by reading and libraries.

Click on this for the .pdf download. It was released this week at ChangeThis.com.

Prof. John Lande has his new article (of the above-title) in the Ohio State Journal on Dispute Resolution (“JDR“), the official law journal of the American Bar Association’s Section on Dispute Resolution and the most cited journal in the field of Alternative Dispute Resolution, available as a .pdf online at his website. It’s a comprehensive and detailed article (almost 90 pages including it footnotes) recommending policymaking principles; outlining a general approach to policymaking; and then applying the principles to proposals for new ethical rules for negotiation, specifically Collaborative Law ethical rule proposals. He recommendations and conclusions include: (1) dispute system design should be the initial and primary approach in analyzing policy options; (2) process pluralism is critical to engender a wide range of available “goals, norms, procedures, results, professional roles, skills, and styles in handling disputes involving legal issues,” to promote an ADR system as a whole rather than to promote one particular ADR process; and (3) legal regulation should be a limited and last resort in developing new ADR policies.

Prof. John Lande continues his insightful work on Collaborative and Cooperative law with his recent article Lessons For Collaborative Lawyers and Other Dispute Resolution Professionals From Colorado Bar Association Ethics Opinion 115, published online at Mediate.com in April, and also posted here at his website together with other articles on this and related topics. Background to this issue is found in this earlier post about the Colorado Ethics Committee’s Opinion finding Collaborative Law per se unethical, and this one overviewing the promises and perils of Collaborative Law.

Here’s an excerpt:

[Ethics Opinion 115] found per se violations of ethical rules when Collaborative Law involves four-way agreements beween lawyers and clients. It also found that similar Cooperative Law agreements do not violate the ethical rules. Readers may wonder what is the difference between Collaborative and Cooperative Law? What can you learn from this opinion and why should you care? This article addresses these questions.

“Save the date” for my September 26 – 28, 2007 SES (Science, Ethics and Spirit) Conference in Santa Fe. There will also be a two-day pre-conference Transformational Mediation Training by the Institute for the Study of Conflict Transformation (ISCT), a national think-tank supported by a consortium of universities including the University of North Dakota, Hofstra Law School, Temple University, and James Madison University. Kristine Paranica, the Administrative Director and Fellow of the Institute, and Director of University of North Dakota’s Conflict Resolution Center, will then present two workshops at the SES conference: one on transformational mediation, and one on the use of transformative principles in conflict communication. Both the pre-conference Transformational Mediation Training and the SES Conference will take place at the Upaya Zen Center in Santa Fe, NM with the opportunity to interact with the Center’s diverse residential community of monks and lay people. I expect that both CEU and CLE credits will be available for both. I’ll post more details over the next couple of weeks, so please check back.

Not just for attorneys — do you have a question about an ethical issue pertaining to mediation? The ABA’s Section of Dispute Resolution has formed a committee to provide advisory responses to ethical questions. From the Section’s website:

Our Committee on Mediator Ethical Guidance is now ready to accept your inquiries and provide advisory responses to your requests. Section Chair John Bickerman is pleased to announce this important project for the Section and the field: “There is no greater way for consumers to have confidence in the services that mediators provide them then to know that mediators are following the ethical duties of their profession. As the leader in policy and practice in the field of dispute resolution, the DR Section is pleased to be able to provide guidance to mediators, the parties andlawyers who use their services.”

The current scope of the Committee is limited to the consideration of ethical issues pertaining to mediation. The Committee may accept an inquiry from an ABA member, an individual who is not an ABA member, an organization or may consider an issue on its own initiative. While it may draw on other sources of authority, such as opinions or other guidance issued by state ethics authorities, its focus will be on interpreting the American Bar Association Model Standards of Conduct for Mediators (2005) and applying them to the issue presented.

Here’s their intake form.

Here’s the link to the full ABA announcement.

Thanks to Geoff Sharp, a New Zealander attorney, mediator, and blogger for this!

I like the Thinking Ethics blog, and only wish it were easier to link to direct posts on the site-you can navigate to the categories and specific posts from within the site, but it seems to only give the home page http: address. Here’s about some ethical computer games, posted Monday, April 2:

Role playing

Here are three intresting ethical computer games:

You can help stop the crisis in Darfur as you role play in a refugee camp in www.darfurisdying.com

You can see what it is like to live in poverty and try to stay healthy in Haiti in the Unicef Voices of Youth game Ayiti: The Cost of Life

You can save and rebuild an island in the World Food Program’s Food Force.

Here’s a post about another source of ethical games and puzzles (from March 9) :

Games and puzzles

ERC, the Ethics Resource Center, a site devoted to organizational ethics in the US, has a selection of ethical games and puzzles (mostly crosswods). link here

And another (from Feb. 6):

Ethics Games

In case you want to practice – new computer game that is “sweeping the Federal Agencies…”, the US Office of Government Ethics proudly presents… here

Also the Institute of Business Ethics in the UK has some great teaching material – the business cases can be found here.

Thank you, Thinking Ethics!

My thanks to one of Engaging Conflict’s  readers for forwarding me the links for this.  The Fetzer Institute is sponsoring The Campaign for Love & Forgiveness, a campaign extending from late 2006 into 2008 that:

combines public television programming, community activities and events, and on-line discussions to encourage contemplation and conversation about how love and forgiveness can effect meaningful change in individuals and society.

As I like film, I’m particularly interested in the PBS programming, which comprises the broadcast of three documentaries: The Mystery of Love, The Power of Forgiveness, and Unforgivable?

The Power of Forgiveness includes interviews with Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh, and Nobel Peace Laureate Elie Wiesel. Here’s a description:

This film examines the power of forgiveness in alleviating anger and grief caused by the most dramatic transgressions imaginable and those that are more commonplace. Among its subjects the film will feature families of victims from the tragedy of 9/11 and forgiveness education in Northern Ireland, where unforgiveness has been a way of life for generations.

You can check the film’s special, pre-PBS release screening schedule to see if it is coming to a city near you.

The Campaign’s website also includes Practices, and Resources, of love and forgiveness.

As previously posted in EngagingConflicts here, there is a significant ethical critique of Collaborative Law, and a growing movement for the practice of Cooperative Law. The main issue is Collaborative Law’s requirement of mandatory attorney disqualification if the process is unsuccessful. Cooperative Law is defined in the Colorado Ethics Committee’s Opinion as identical to Collaborative Law, but without the mandatory attorney disqualification agreement.

This is the Conclusion from Ethics Opinion 115: Ethical Considerations in the Collaborative and Cooperative Law Contexts (Adopted February 24, 2006)(note: date is probably a typo, as this Opinion has just been released):

The Colorado Rules of Professional Conduct prohibit a lawyer from participating in Collaborative Law so long as a contractual obligation exists between the lawyer and the opposing party whereby the lawyer agrees to terminate the representation of the client. Absent such a contractual obligation, a lawyer may participate in the process referred to as Cooperative Law provided that the lawyer complies with all of the Rules of Professional Conduct.

The Opinion lays out the Committee’s analysis, and also provides an extensive discussion of the “myriad potential ethical pitfalls” in a Cooperative Law practice, which include provisions relating to terminating the attorney-client relationship; communications with the client (concerning the applicable range of alternative courses of action in the client’s case); considerations of whether the client is under a disability (particularly if there is a history of domestic abuse in the family law context); and Cooperative Law organizations (as possibly impermissible referral services). These issues are also potentially relevant in jurisdictions where a Collaborative Law practice is not per se unethical.

Colorado does not have a mandatory bar association, and the Committee’s opinion is not per se binding on attorneys. However, it is a powerful statement about the practice of Collaborative (and Cooperative) Law in Colorado, and of the potential issues everywhere.

This is how the Colorado Ethics Committee describes itself (from its website):

The Colorado Bar Association Ethics Committee is a standing committee of the Colorado Bar Association, staffed by approximately 90 Colorado attorneys, existing for the purpose of giving ethics advice to Colorado attorneys. The Committee will answer written requests for ethics advice subject to certain exceptions such as those listed below. The Committee will issue Formal Ethics Opinions concerning topics of general interest. . . .

The Ethics Committee is NOT associated with the Colorado Supreme Court, the Presiding Disciplinary Judge, the Attorney Regulation Committee, or the Office of Attorney Regulation Counsel. Committee Opinions, whether informal written opinions or published formal Ethics Opinions, are issued for advisory purposes only and are not in any way binding on the Colorado Supreme Court, the Presiding Disciplinary Judge, the Attorney Regulation Committee, Attorney Regulation Counsel, or the Office of Attorney Regulation Counsel and do not provide protection against disciplinary actions.

The opinion is not yet posted at its website. If you would like a copy, please send an email to gn@gnconflictmanagement.com, with “Opinion” in the subject line, and I’ll send back a copy. BUT SEE UPDATE!

UPDATE: I didn’t know how to upload documents to the blog when I posted this originally, and now I do. Here’s the Ethics Opinion (it will open in .pdf). ethics-opinion-_115-colo-cl.pdf

Kristine Paranica of the Institute for the Study of Conflict Transformation (ISCT) just posted this announcement:

You are invited to the First National Symposium on Ethical Standards for Elder Mediation, April 19-20, 2007 at Temple University’s James E. Beasley School of Law, Philadelphia, PA. Find all the details at www.mediation-services.org.

This exciting 2-day event will feature Harry “Rick” Moody, Nancy Neveloff Dubler, Robert Baruch Bush and distinguished panelists from the fields of mediation, elder law, bioethics, geriatric ethics, geriatric medicine and social work. The Symposium will tackle critical issues such as the impact of societal aging biases on the mediation process, capacity issues, and a mediator’s responsibility when the outcome of a mediation violates ethical and/or legal norms.

At this time, registration may be completed by mail and by check. On-line registration and credit card payment is available on our website at www.mediation-services.org.

Please note that space is limited to the first 100 registrants and that the super early bird fee of $325 that includes meals and the special Thursday evening dinner event is only good until February 15. Then regular and late fees apply. We expect to fill the Symposium to capacity, so please register early. You will receive confirmation of your admittance into the Symposium upon receipt of your registration and payment.

Please direct your questions to Kathryn Mariani at eldermediation@mediation-services.org or (610) 277-8909.

We hope to see you this spring!

Kristine, thank you, and thanks to ISTC for sponsoring such programs!