This is the middle.
Things have had time to get complicated,
messy, really. Nothing is simple anymore.
Cities have sprouted up along the rivers
teeming with people at cross-purposes –
a million schemes, a million wild looks.
Disappointment unsolders his knapsack
here and pitches his ragged tent.
This is the sticky part where the plot congeals,
where the action suddenly reverses
or swerves off in an outrageous direction.
Here the narrator devotes a long paragraph
to why Miriam does not want Edward's child.
Someone hides a letter under a pillow.
Here the aria rises to a pitch,
a song of betrayal, salted with revenge.
And the climbing party is stuck on a ledge
halfway up the mountain.
This is the bridge, the painful modulation.
This is the thick of things.
So much is crowded into the middle –
the guitars of Spain, piles of ripe avocados,
Russian uniforms, noisy parties,
lakeside kisses, arguments heard through a wall
too much to name, too much to think about.
My own personal 200-year present spans the life of my maternal grandparents who were nine years old in 1909, and that of my step-children’s children, who (assuming they procreate on a reasonable schedule) should be ninety-five'ish in 2109.
asked here whether the shiny, flying, silver Jiffy Pop-looking craft tethered in the backyard of Richard Heene was an "attractive nuisance" under the law.
My imagined grandchildren, [6] born sometime between today and 2014, will not be strangers to any of my grandfather’s technologies. Despite the advent of compact fluorescent light bulbs, the early lives of my step-children's children will likely pass under the glow of the same incandescent lights that brightened granddad’s one-room school house. They will be transported to school in cars with internal combustion engines, learn the same alphabet from the same cardboard and paper books (as well as from the "e" variety) [7] and play many of the same games[8] he did – hop scotch, jump rope and ring-around the rosy.
Change will etch itself into the lives of my grandchildren as surely as it did my own, my parents' and my grandparents'. Hybrids will give way to fully electric (and perhaps hemp-powered)[9] vehicles (effective or defective) and though electricity will continue to be generated by hydroelectric dams, wind farms and nuclear power plants, some new and unimaginable source of power will surely push back the nights of my grand children's children. [10]
Law, politics, society and culture also exist in the 200-year present of conflict resolution.[11] In my personal 200-year span, the law seems to have changed the most profoundly. Was it the law first and culture later? Or do they weave our future together?
The first U.S. woman lawyer, Myra Bradwell, was admitted to practice a mere ten years before my grandmother was born. Mrs. Bradwell’s legal career was the subject of one of the sorriest U.S. Supreme Court decisions ever handed down, in which the Court opined,
The civil law as well as nature itself, has always recognized a wide difference in the respective spheres and destinies of man and woman. Man is, or should be, woman’s protector and defender. The natural and proper timidity and delicacy which belongs to the female sex evidently unfits it for many of the occupations of civil life. The constitution of the family organization, which is founded in the divine ordinance, as well as in the nature of things, indicates the domestic sphere as that which properly belongs to the domain and functions of womanhood. The harmony, not to say the identity, of interests and views which belong, or should belong, to the family institution is repugnant to the idea for a woman adopting a distinct and independent career from that of her husband … for these reasons I think that the laws of Illinois now complained of are not obnoxious to the charge of any abridging any of the privileges and immunities of cities of the United States.
Another nineteen years would pass after Bradwell began her practice before she (and my nineteen year old grandmother) were guaranteed the right to vote. [13] And another 30 years would pass after my women's movement -- the Second Wave -- before we'd have our own business magazine - ForbesWoman (my part in it here). And let us not forget that despite the 20th Century's great civil rights achievements, when America catches a cold, black America gets pneumonia. See e.g. Problems All Around for Blacks in Big Law at Being a Black Lawyer.
My grandparents', parents' and step-children's 20th Century was dominated by genocide[14] on a scale and a technological precision unimaginable to our earlier forebears. Mid-century brought with it the threat of nuclear annihilation but also liberated millions of people enslaved by colonialism. We cured polio in my own lifetime with both "dead" and "live" vaccines (neither of them counterfeit) - a singular moment in scientific history during which no one took ownership of the cure and no one tried to stop others from seeking another, a problem Patently O addressed this week in Reverse Payments.
Whether god or satan, heaven or hell, war or peace "won" the twentieth century, the world's greatest peace-making body was created during it -- the United Nations. And here in the U.S., the “living room war,” Viet Nam, coupled with the largest generation of adolescents ever to grace American society, ended the forcible induction of young men into the military. [15]
With the recent discovery of our earliest ancestor, Ardi, our biological and social lives exist in a 4.4 million year now. Our physical bodies “evolve” in the womb along the same lines as did our species and, once born, we carry with us our earliest organs. [16] Most critical of these to conflict escalation and avoidance is our “fight-flight” mechanism – the amygdala.[17] And the most pertinent biological agents to promote the collaborative resolution of conflict are our “mirror neurons” which
provide a powerful biological foundation for the evolution of culture . . . absorb[ing] it directly, with each generation teaching the next by social sharing, imitation and observation.
How we’ve manage to survive despite our tendency to misread one another’s actions, intentions and emotions, is often the subject of those who advise us how to choose and move juries -- here -- Anne Reed at Deliberations (explaining why "they" don't see things like "we" do here); and, the Jury Room (explaining why pain hurts more intensely when we believe it's been intentionally inflicted here).
The Most Effective Conflict Resolution Technology is the Oldest
One of our true original gangsters, Al Capone, is reported to have said that “you can get much further with a kind word and a gun than you can with a kind word alone” and one of our greatest Presidents, Theodore Roosevelt said “speak softly and carry a big stick.”
As Robert Wright, author of The Moral Animal explained, had Tit for Tat been tossed into the game with 50 steadfast non-cooperators, there would have been a 49-way tie for first place. But none of the players' programs failed to cooperate in at least some circumstances, leaving Tit for Tat the clear victor. According to Wright, humans, like the programs in Axelrod's competition, are evolutionarily “designed” to cooperate under at least some circumstances. The engine and benefit of cooperation is present in our neurochemistry. When scientists observed the brain activity of volunteers playing the Prisoner’s Dilemma game, for instance, they found that the participants' “reward circuits” were activated and their impulsive "me first" circuits inhibited when they cooperated. Cooperation, retaliation, forgiveness and a return to cooperation. Tit for Tat.
We don't "dis" lawyers here at the Negotiation Blog. We simply remind ourselves that our primary purpose is the promotion of justice, with a stable societal order closely behind. Most people don't understand, for instance, that Shakespeare's famous the first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyerswas not an insult. In King Henry IV, Act IV, Scene II, Shakespeare's sentiment was not his own, but that of a revolutionary who wished to destroy the social order.
The historic "present" of laws and lawyers is in the thousands, not simply the hundreds, of years. Hammurabi (make of his choice for the memorialization of his laws what you will) was the sixth king of Babylon, remembered for creating -- in his own name (and likeness?) - the first written and systematic legal code.
For the wrongful killing of another, for instance, the victim’s kin were paid according to the social status of the deceased party. Thus the ‘man price’ for killing a peasant was 200 shillings and that for a nobleman 1200 shillings. Payments were not, however, tailored to the loss, but fixed according to types of affront, a distinction we continue to make when we punish intentional torts more severely than negligent ones. [24]>
Lawyers, litigators and trial lawyers are too often demonized by the ADR community as if you could get someone to sit down to negotiate without first pointing the gun of litigation at their heads; I salute you (and myself, for that matter!) for bringing us all to the bargaining table. See Steve Mehta's recent post at Mediation Matters, Factors When Peace Makes Sense for a note that touches upon the symbiotic relationship between litigation and mediation, litigators and mediators.
I shouldn't cite single legal blogs twice, but I cannot resist this quote of Scott Greenfield's on another pundit's view of the future lawyers have in store for them, i.e.,
shucking oysters for a living if we don't accept a future of lawyers being piece workers in factories, sending our work off to Bangalore in pdf files and complementing people on their choice of forms at Legal Zoom.
Which came first? Public civil trials or private arbitrations? You’ll be surprised, I’ll wager, to hear that arbitration was one of the earliest forms of dispute resolution, practiced by the juris consults of the Roman Empire. Roman arbitration predates the adversarial system of common law by more than a thousand years. [25]
Ah, the glory of Rome! The juris consulti were (like too many mediators) amateurs who dabbled in dispute resolution, raising the question whether they (and we) should be certified or regulated as Diane Levin asks at The Mediation Channel this week. The Roman hobbyists gave legal opinions (responsa) to all comers (a practice known as publice respondere). They also served the needs of Roman judges and governors would routinely consult with advisory panels of jurisconsults before rendering decisions. Thus, the Romans – god bless them! - were the first to have a class of people who spent their days thinking about legal problems (an activity some readers will recall Ralph Nader calling "mental gymnastics in an iron cage").
18th Century Dispute Resolution Technology: The (Inevitably Polarizing) Adversarial System
It was Buckminster Fuller who famously opined that the "significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them." If you keep this aphorism in mind for the remainder of this post, you'll likely have some extraordinarily innovative comments to make in the comment section below.
As the Law Guru wiki reminds us, we can trace the adversarial system to the "medieval mode of trial by combat, in which some litigants were allowed a champion to represent them." We owe our present day adversarialism, however, to the common law's use of the jury - the power of argumentation replacing the power of the sword.
The Act abolishing the infamous Star Chamber in 1641 also granted every "freeman" the right to trial by "lawful judgment of his peers" or by the "law of the land" before the Crown could "take[] or imprison[]" him or "disseis[e] [him] of his freehold or liberties, or free customs." Nor could he any longer be "outlawed or exciled or otherwise destroyed." Nor could the King "pass upon him or condemn him."
English colonies like our own adopted the jury trial system and we, of course, enshrined that system in the Fifth, Sixth, and Seventh Amendments. Whether this 17th century dispute resolution technology can be fine-tuned to keep abreast of 21st century dispute creation technology (particularly in the quickly moving area of intellectual property) remains one of the pressing questions of legal and ADR policy and practice, particularly in a week in which a Superior Court verbally punished the lawyers before it for filing The Most Oppressive Motion Ever Presented (see the Laconic Law Blog). The motion?
Defendants['] . . . motion for summary judgment/summary adjudication, seeking adjudication of 44 issues, most of which were not proper subjects of adjudication. Defendants’ separate statement was 196 pages long, setting forth hundreds of facts, many of them not material—as defendants’ own papers conceded. And the moving papers concluded with a request for judicial notice of 174 pages. All told, defendants’ moving papers were 1056 pages.
Mediator, author and activist, Ken Cloke, suggests that interest-based resolutions to conflict must replace power and rights based resolutions if we expect to create a future in which justice prevails. As Ken wrote in Conflict Revolution:
Approaching evil and injustice from an interest-based perspective means listening to the deeper truths that gave rise to them, extending compassion even to those who were responsible for evils or injustices, and seeking not merely to replace one evil or injustice with another, but to reduce their attractiveness by designing outcomes, processes, and relationships that encourage adversaries to work collaboratively to satisfy their interests.
Evil and injustice can therefore be considered byproducts of reliance on power or rights, and failures or refusals to learn and evolve.
All political systems generate chronic conflicts that reveal their internal weaknesses, external pressures, and demands for evolutionary change. Power- and rights-based systems are adversarial and unstable, and therefore avoid, deny, resist, and defend themselves against change. As a result, they suppress conflicts or treat them as purely interpersonal, leaving insiders less informed and able to adapt, and outsiders feeling they were treated unjustly and contemplating evil in response.
As pressures to change increase, these systems must either adapt, or turn reactionary and take a punitive, retaliatory attitude toward those seeking to promote change, delaying their own evolution. Only interest-based systems are fully able to seek out their weaknesses, proactively evolve, transform conflicts into sources of learning, and celebrate those who brought them to their attention.
These are the words I leave with the readers of Blawg Review #234 because they are the ones that informed my personal and professional transformation from a legal career based on rights and remedies to one based upon interests and consensus.
Whatever my own personal 200-year present was, is and will be, it is pointed in the direction of peace with justice, with an enormous and probably unwarranted optimism best expressed by the man after whom my law school was named: Martin Luther King, Jr. - the arc of history is long, but it bends toward justice.
Blawg Review has information about next week's host, and instructions how to get your blawg posts reviewed in upcoming issues. Next week's host, Counsel to Counsel, will devote its round-up of the week's best legal posts to the Great Recession.
[16] Earlier scientific theory posited that each human embryo (see Embryo Mix-Up at the Proud Parenting Blog) passes through a progression of abbreviated stages that resemble the main evolutionary stages of its ancestors, i.e., that the fertilized egg starts as a single cell (just like our first living evolutionary ancestor); as the egg repeatedly divides it develops into an embryo with a segmented arrangement (the “worm” stage); these segments develop into vertebrae, muscles and something that sort of looks like gills (the “fish” stage); limb buds develop with paddle-like hands and feet, and there appears to be a “tail” (the “amphibian” stage); and, by the eighth week of development, most organs are nearly complete, the limbs develop fingers and toes, and the “tail” disappears (the human stage). It turns out that this one-to-one correlation was too simplistic, but it remains safe to say that our biological development still passes through several stages that “recapitulate” the evolution of our species.
[17] The amygdala is a region of the brain that permits the formation and storage of memories associated with emotional events. It permits us to “read” the emotional responses of our fellows and is thought to facilitated our ability to form relationships and live and work in groups. It is also the source of our “fight or flight” response to danger.
Studies show that some mirror neurons fire when a person reaches for a glass or watches someone else reach for a glass; others fire when the person puts the glass down and still others fire when the person reaches for a toothbrush and so on. They respond when someone kicks a ball, sees a ball being kicked, hears a ball being kicked and says or hears the word "kick."
“When you see me perform an action - such as picking up a baseball - you automatically simulate the action in your own brain,” said Dr. Marco Iacoboni, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who studies mirror neurons. ”Circuits in your brain, which we do not yet entirely understand, inhibit you from moving while you simulate,” he said. ”But you understand my action because you have in your brain a template for that action based on your own movements. “
[22] Looking toward the future, the Neuroethics and the Law Blog predicts that in the “experiential future, we will have better technologies to measure physical pain, pain relief, and emotional distress. These technologies should not only change tort law and related compensation schemes but should also change our assessments of criminal blameworthiness and punishment severity” here.
The adversarial system of medical negligence fails to satisfy the main aims of tort law, those being equitable compensation of plaintiffs, correction of mistakes and deterrence of negligence. Instead doctors experience litigation as a punishment and, in order to avoid exposure to the system, have resorted not to corrective or educational measures but to defensive medicine, a practice which the evidence indicates both decreases patient autonomy and increases iatrogenic injury.
(Iatrogenic, by the way, is a fancy term for “we have know idea whatsoever what the source of this ailment is). Chris is looking for comments so run on over there if you’ve been thinking about medical malpractice litigation during the marathon American health care debates.
We hear a lot of talk these days about rhetoric and whether people are able to follow through on it, deliver "the goods", stay true to the rule. We live in a cynical age and diminish rhetoric as if it were all just a slick sales presentation and we its potentially gullible consumers.
My generation and perhaps every generation that followed was weaned on a distrust of words. But a nation of laws is premised on words, some of which have taken us more than 200 years to put into action -- that nation "conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal."
Negotiators use words too, when they aren't flailing their arms, packing their briefcases in a show of temper or scowling in disapproval at their bargaining partners' intractability. In fact, using our words is the great achievement of civilization to date: forming and professing beliefs, organizing support or opposition, voting, and, in the justice business -- making opening statements, eliciting testimony, submitting documentary evidence, making closing arguments, seeking jury instructions and, at long last, receiving the written verdict of the justice system's intestinal tract -- the decision of 12 men and women good and true.
I believed in words from the first, sitting on my grandmother's capacious lap, following her finger under each printed rune, hearing Genesis from the King James version and attending to Longfellow's tear-jerking narrative poem Evangeline from the safety of her presence, the sound of her voice, the lamplight that encircled us, the arms that held me firm. From my beginning, words meant love, which is likely the reason I am a writer, a poet, the editor of a literary journal, a literature major and later a law student and lawyer, for whom words had become not simply the way to express human connection, but a means of exercising power and resolving conflict if not precisely ever looking for or ascertaining the "truth," trembling naked in its hiding place. We still need poetry for that -- the truth.
I lost poetry in law school and later in practice - the pleasure of words for their own sake and in the service of love - the love spoken in word-breath to a child on her grandmother's lap. In law school and later, they'd become implements of analysis and then weapons to bring my adversaries to their knees. It rarely worked like that -- victory -- righteous and right, but still I soldiered on.
I found the poetry inside of me again, my grandmother's heritage, in UCLA's creative writing extension program where I first studied under one of the most lyrical memoirists of our time - Bernard Cooper. He reassured me that my words were still good after two decades of legal practice. I could justly take pride in my sentences and paragraphs and the courage it takes to express one's own idiosyncratic imagination. But Bernard warned me that "anyone can write a great paragraph. Putting those paragraphs together like Frankenstein working on the monster of his novel or memoir, that's a quite different discipline, with the emphasis on work, not talent."
So I wrote a little, published here and there and finally decided to simply publish the literature of others here. I did not, finally possess the lonely discipline of the long-distance writer. But it is enough to have added a few words to the river of poetry Mary Oliver says we are swimming in the minute we open a collection and begin to read the broken lines within.
Below are the words that open Evangeline. The closing lines of this long, sentimental poem, brought tears to my grandmother's eyes - shocking! for one who had never seen her cry before and never would again, even as she lay thin and wasting in a nursing home, bone cancer taking her away from me far too soon. But she left me this (and lives on in me because of its expression).
are pleasure first, bodily pleasure, a deliciousness of the senses. Mostly, poems end by saying something (even the unsayable) but they start as the body's joy, like making love. Sometimes a poem remains a small pleasing sensation:
Bah, bah, black sheep,
Have you any wool?
Yes, sir. Yes, sir.
Three bags full.
Maybe these words once referred to taxation, but we hear them now without being
tempted to paraphrase. Instead,we chew on them, taste them, and dance to them.
This banquet or ballet starts in the crib, before arithmetic or thought. Everyone
was once an infant who took mouth pleasure in gurgle and shriek, accompanied
by muscle joy as our small limbs clenched and unclenched.
Poetry starts from the crib; a thousand years later, John Donne makes lovers into compasses, T. S. Eliot contemplates the still point of the turning world, and Elizabeth Bishop remembers sitting as a child in the dentist's waiting room; but if these poets did not retain the mouth pleasure of a baby's autistic utterance—pleasure in vowels on the tongue, pleasure in changes of volume and pause: Bah, bah, black sheep—we would not hear their meditations and urgencies.
The body is poetry's door; the sounds of words—throbbing in legs and arms; rich in the mouth—let us into the house.
When we speak to one another - when we listen - when we attend to the words and their feeling - we are moved in the direction of another, toward the collective good. It just works like that. We are infants first, disappointed and suspicious adults only later. I do not advocate letting down our guard in the presence of those who seek to deceive us. I recommend only being open to those we know are speaking the truth of our species, the truth we can feel when another human being puts aside the words of discord and blame, stops making "demands" and speaks in the voice of another creature on the planet making meaning: a voice that will always urge us toward unity, liberty, generosity, accountability, forgiveness and reconciliation.
Sometimes, all that stands between us and giving up (R.I.P. David Carradine) is the knowledge that we are not in this alone and "cannot be forever blessed." Paul Simon's ** American Tune from 1975, another time when the American Economy was flagging.
There's something about this song that always brings tears to my eyes at the same time as it makes me feel connected to something greater than myself.
Words & music by Paul Simon
Many's the time I've been mistaken
And many times confused
Yes, and I've often felt forsaken
And certainly misused
Oh, but I'm all right, I'm all right
I'm just weary to my bones
Still, you don't expect to be
Bright and bon vivant
So far away from home, so far away from home
And I don't know a soul who's not been battered
I don't have a friend who feels at ease
I don't know a dream that's not been shattered
or driven to its knees
but it's all right, it's all right
for we lived so well so long
Still, when I think of the
road we're traveling on
I wonder what's gone wrong
I can't help it, I wonder what's gone wrong
And I dreamed I was dying
I dreamed that my soul rose unexpectedly
And looking back down at me
Smiled reassuringly
And I dreamed I was flying
And high up above my eyes could clearly see
The Statue of Liberty
Sailing away to sea
And I dreamed I was crying
We come on the ship they call the Mayflower
We come on the ship that sailed the moon
We come in the age's most uncertain hours
and sing an American tune
Oh, and it's alright, it's all right, it's all right
You can't be forever blessed
Still, tomorrow's going to be another working day
And I'm trying to get some rest
That's all I'm trying to get some rest
_________________
** Paul Simon's been the sound track of my life. In 1965, when I graduated from Middle School (then called "Junior High") my graduation speech was built around Simon's "I Am a Rock" (which Simon describes here as his "most neurotic song.") Naturally. I was 13 years old!
The full chimp story (chimpanzee in red sweat-shirt, jeans and shoes causes the police to "un-arrest" his owner) is an hilarious example of a lose-lose negotiation impasse. Lesson: as the 12-step people caution: "you can't save your face and your ass at the same time."
The other, more sober tale, reveals the competing interests keeping American banks from pursuing the win-win solution that would permit "upside down" homeowners to remain in their houses and continue paying at least part of their debt. Why? Among other reasons, renegotiating loans secured by deeds of trust would require banks to carry a toxic assets on their balance sheets today rather than next year.
Other impediments include the more practical road-blocks that impede efficient management of all organizations -- a lack of preparedness -- in this case, an inability to get mortgage renegotiation service centers up and running fast enough to keep up with the crisis. We're hoping that the President's economic advisors already know this, or are still finding the time to download This American Life to their iPods or Blackberries.
Excerpt and video below but a reading of the entire post is a must for anyone looking for reasons to believe that we can reach one another across political, cultural, religious, social and economic divides.
The music develops by a process of answer and call. One of them plays a riff, or a short section of music, which is then followed by the other. They react to one another responding to and developing upon the riff they have just heard. By doing so they produce this amazing music in a memorable scene that is part of cinema folklore.
It represents a rare moment of optimism in what is an otherwise unbearably dark, oppressive film.
In the process of exchanging these riffs the protagonists are effectively collaborating. They are communicating. We can see their riffs as an analogy for talking. The riffs work where the spoken word does not. Drew and the Banjo boy clearly develop and enjoy a relationship while they are playing.
There's been some salacious commentary (such as WAC's Like a Vixen) about Blawg Review # 171. I just want to say to anyone who missed the sexual revolution -- on either side of the generation gap -- we're sorry to have started it all. We just never really left high school.
We've also heard some complaints that the most recent Blawg Review is just too darn long. In honor of our sister blog and those attorneys who are still billing 2400 hours/year, we give you the IP Executive Summary of the Virgin Blawg Review #171 below.
My late mother, aleha ha-shalom, told me repeatedly that I had a religious obligation to learn every day, and I have honored her memory by doing exactly that. Learning also involves changing how you think about things; it doesn't only mean reinforcing the existing views you already have. In this respect, Second Circuit Judge Pierre Leval once said that the best way to know you have a mind is to change it, and I have tried to live by that wisdom too. There are positions I have taken in the past I no longer hold, and some that I continue to hold. I have tried to be honest with myself: if you are not genuinely honest with yourself, you can't learn, and if you worry about what others think of you, you will be living their version of your life and not yours.
Other IP bloggers have, of course, reflected on Patry's Final Blog Words here and here.
The IP Dispute of the Week, of course, is Hasbro's suit against Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla for their Facebook hit Scrabulous. Scrabble itself was invented during the Depression by Alfred Mosher Butts, an out-of-work architect. How did he do it? As the New York Times explained in its review of Steve Fastis book, Word Freak (Zo. Qi. Doh. Hoo. Qursh)Scrabble's inventor assumed that the game would work best if the game letters "appear[ed] in the same frequency as in the language itself." So he
counted letters in The New York Times, The New York Herald Tribune and The Saturday Evening Post to calculate letter frequencies for various word lengths. Playing the game with his wife, Nina, and experimenting as he went along, Butts carefully worked out the size of the playing grid (225 squares, or 15 by 15), the number of tiles (100), point values for the letters, the placement of double- and triple-score squares, the distribution of vowels and consonants, and so on.
If Player 1 opens with "fringe" (double word) for 24 points; Player 2 follows by slapping an "i" on the triple word score followed by an "n" for "infringe" and 33 points; and, Player 1 responds with "ment" for 19 points, the combined score for "infringement" is 75 points. Our readers can do the math and moves on "trademark" and copyright."
"a new studio tactic [is] not to prevent piracy, but to delay it . . . Warner Bros. executives said [they] prevent[ed] camcorded copies of the reported $180-million [Dark Knight] film from reaching Internet file-sharing sites for about 38 hours. Although that doesn't sound like much progress, it was enough time to keep bootleg DVDs off the streets as the film racked up a record-breaking $158.4 million on opening weekend. . . The success of an anti-piracy campaign is measured in the number of hours it buys before the digital dam breaks.'"
If you're sufficiently virginal to believe in magic, check out the Law and Magic Law Blog's announcement of the dismissal of a defamation lawsuit againstMagic Mag as protected opinion while Ernie the Attorney has at least one more make to make your iPhone magic here.
Next week, the Blawg Review will be hosted by the Ohio Employer's Law Blog which we expect will be far more respectful of BR's readers' political, religious and sexual sensitivities than this one was. Thanks for letting us play. And a very, very, very good night!
As I've often said before, law is the default profession for liberal arts majors. And make no mistake, many of us continue to dance, sing, play musical instruments, act, paint, sculpt, and even write poetry. (See Strangers to Us All - Lawyers and Poetry)
According to writer and surgeon Atul Gawande's recent article The Itch, the way the pepper tree in my back yard appears from my bedroom window may be as much as ninety percent memory and only ten percent "data." As Gawande writes:
Given simply the transmissions along the optic nerve from the light entering the eye one would not be able to reconstruct the three-dimensionality, or the distance, or the detail of the bark -- attributes that we perceive instantly.
In other words, perception is not merely reception. "Objective reality" is just the brain's "best guess" about what the eyes observe, the ears hear and the fingers touch.
"The images in our mind," Gawande explains, "are extraordinarily rich."
We can tell if something is liquid or solid, heavy or light, dead or alive. But the information we work from is poor -- a distorted, two-dimensional transmission with entire spots missing. So the mind fills in most of the picture. You can get a sense of this from brain-anatomy studies. If visual sensations were primarily received rather than constructed by the brain, you'd expect that most of the fibres going to the brain's primary visual cortex would come from the retina. Instead, scientists have found that only twenty per cent do; eighty per cent come downward from regions of the brain governing functions like memory. Richard Gregory, a prominent British neuropsychologist, estimates that visual perception is more than ninety per cent memory and less than ten per cent sensory nerve signals.
Gawande doesn't explain how we manage to agree on anything with such impoverished perceptual abilities and richly imagined constructs of "objective reality." I suspect that our insatiable urge to tell one another stories is the primary way we create the collective memories that allow us to agree upon such simple "facts" as "the apple is red and somewhat round," if not necessarily that "the blue Kia entered the intersection after the traffic light turned red."
What strikes me about Gawande's article is not so much the pure science described there, but the way in which opposing parties in litigation resemble "phantom limbs" and joint sessions the mirrors used by physicians to treat the pain "felt" in them.
Recent research demonstrates that amputees' phantom limb pain can be reduced or eliminated by "fooling" the brain into believing that the missing limb is "well." When researchers asked amputees to put their surviving arm through a hole in the side of a box with a mirror inside and to then move "both" arms,
[t]he patients had the sense that they had two arms again. Even though they knew it was an illusion, it provided immediate relief. People who for years had been unable to unclench their phantom fist suddenly felt their hand open; phantom arms in painfully contorted positions could relax. With daily use of the mirror box over weeks, patients sensed their phantom limbs actually shrink into their stumps and, in several instances, completely vanish. . . .
. . . here’s what the new theory suggests is going on: when your arm is amputated, nerve transmissions are shut off, and the brain’s best guess often seems to be that the arm is still there, but paralyzed, or clenched, or beginning to cramp up. Things can stay like this for years. The mirror box, however, provides the brain with new visual input—however illusory—suggesting motion in the absent arm. The brain has to incorporate the new information into its sensory map of what’s happening. Therefore, it guesses again, and the pain goes away.
Litigation separates the parties from one another as radically as an amputation, often under circumstances where the law suit is all they have in common. Like amputees, the parties cannot massage the missing muscle, scratch the irritating itch, or ease the frustrating pain.
When physicians give their patients mirrors and instruct them to move their one remaining arm in concert with its physically re-imagined partner, they conduct a silent concert of healing. With "new" information (hey! there's my other arm and it's not all cramped up!) the brain readjusts and stops sending false signals. The muscle relaxes. The itch is scratched. The pain is relieved.
Joint sessions can be used as mirrors to make missing disputants appear again./* The mediator -- who is trained in this art -- creates an environment (the "box") in which the parties are able to adjust the mis-impressions and correct the mis-communications that make the conflict so difficult to resolve. After a brief period of discomfort and incoordination, the disputants begin to tell their stories of injustice in concert, spontaneously harmonizing the points on which there is little disagreement and resolving those parts of the tale where the greatest differences lie.
Those parts of the story that have grown wildly distorted in the absence of any corrective influence, are shrunk back to their appropriate size. Freed from the tyranny of their phantom "others," the parties begin to work collaboratively to solve the problem that they now understand is mutual.
Though this is surely metaphor, the process is not just theory. When parties consent to a joint session orchestrated by the mediator in collaboration with their attorneys, this type of reconciliation happens more often than not.
Don't, however, confuse this joint session with those in which attorneys give one another presentations proving their entitlement to victory as if there were a phantom "decider" -- a missing arbitrator or judge -- somewhere behind a curtain. These are the type of "joint sessions" that have given joint sessions a bad name because counsel well know their opponents' "positions"and the parties tend to become less rather than more amenable to settlement when their opponents' point of view is once again argued to them -- this time in quarters that are far too close for most lawyers, let alone their clients.
We'll keep exploring this issue. For now, more of the Gawande article below.
A new scientific understanding of perception has emerged in the past few decades, and it has overturned classical, centuries-long beliefs about how our brains work—though it has apparently not penetrated the medical world yet. The old understanding of perception is what neuroscientists call “the naïve view,” and it is the view that most people, in or out of medicine, still have. We’re inclined to think that people normally perceive things in the world directly. We believe that the hardness of a rock, the coldness of an ice cube, the itchiness of a sweater are picked up by our nerve endings, transmitted through the spinal cord like a message through a wire, and decoded by the brain. . . .
[There are] some serious flaws in the direct-perception theory—in the notion that when we see, hear, or feel we are just taking in the sights, sounds, and textures of the world. For one thing, it cannot explain how we experience things that seem physically real but aren’t: sensations of itching that arise from nothing more than itchy thoughts; dreams that can seem indistinguishable from reality; phantom sensations that amputees have in their missing limbs. And, the more we examine the actual nerve transmissions we receive from the world outside, the more inadequate they seem.
Our assumption had been that the sensory data we receive from our eyes, ears, nose, fingers, and so on contain all the information that we need for perception, and that perception must work something like a radio. It’s hard to conceive that a Boston Symphony Orchestra concert is in a radio wave. But it is. So you might think that it’s the same with the signals we receive—that if you hooked up someone’s nerves to a monitor you could watch what the person is experiencing as if it were a television show.
Yet, as scientists set about analyzing the signals, they found them to be radically impoverished . . .
Collaboration may be most amenable in areas where there is a need for ongoing relationships, like dissolving marriages that produced children, said Pauline Noe of Cambridge, a past president of the Massachusetts Collaborative Law Council. Noe suggested that discovery is often more fruitful in collaborations than in litigation, since collaboration requires full, prompt, honest and open disclosure of all relevant information, and vigorous good faith negotiation with full participation of all parties in an open forum.
Taking the long view as I'm now prone to do (by virtue of age and the fact that I generally only see litigation's end game) I continue to say that we're all involved in on-going relationships -- not just those people whose disputes are more personal than commercial.
As Joseph Campbell, the great student of world mythology taught us:
Schopenhauer, in his splendid essay called "On an Apparent Intention in the Fate of the Individual," points out that when you reach an advanced age and look back over your lifetime, it can seem to have had a consistent order and plan, as though composed by some novelist. Events that when they occurred had seemed accidental and of little moment turn out to have been indispensable factors in the composition of a consistent plot. So who composed that plot? Schopenhauer suggests that just as your dreams are composed by an aspect of yourself of which your consciousness is unaware, so, too, your whole life is composed by the will within you. And just as people whom you will have met apparently by mere chance became leading agents in the structuring of your life, so, too, will you have served unknowingly as an agent, giving meaning to the lives of others, The whole thing gears together like one big symphony, with everything unconsciously structuring everything else. And Schopenhauer concludes that it is as though our lives were the features of the one great dream of a single dreamer in which all the dream characters dream, too; so that everything links to everything else, moved by the one will to life which is the universal will in nature.
It’s a magnificent idea – an idea that appears in India in the mythic image of the Net of Indra, which is a net of gems, where at every crossing of one thread over another there is a gem reflecting all the other reflective gems. Everything arises in mutual relation to everything else, so you can’t blame anybody for anything. It is even as though there were a single intention behind it all, which always makes some kind of sense, though none of us knows what the sense might be, or has lived the life that he quite intended.
A classic example of combative litigation -- YOU ARE NOT THE BOSS OF ME!
Dust Bowl Refugee, High School Drop Out, Western Union Messenger Boy, Merchant Marine, Salesman, Lawyer, Judge, Husband, "Daddy" Step-Father, Grand-Father, Brother, Uncle, Cousin, Mountain Climber, Sailor, River Rafter, Story-Teller, Proud Capitalist, World-Class Worrier and Sometime Liberal Democrat (when married to one)
The Truth of Departure
-- W.S. Merwin
With each journey it gets
worse
what kind of learning is that
when that is what we are born for
and harder and harder to find
what is hanging on
to what
all day it has been raining
and I have been writing letters
the pearl curtains
stroking the headlands
under immense dark clouds
the valley sighing with rain
everyone home and quiet
what will become of all these
things that I see
that are here and are me
and I am none of them
what will become
of the bench and the teapot
the pencils and the kerosene lamps
all the books all the writing
the green of the leaves
what becomes of the house
and the island
and the sound of your footstep
who knows it is here
who says it will stay
who says I will know it
who said it would be all right
This is the force of faith. Nobody gets
what they want. Never again are you the same. The longing
is to be pure. What you get is to be changed. More and more by
each glistening minute. . . .
If you are of a certain age, you will vividly recall where you were forty years ago when you learned that the unthinkable had happend -- another Kennedy brother had been shot.
I was fifteen years old. The insistent ring of the telephone broke into my sleep in the early morning hours of June 6, 1968. It was my friend the [now] author and journalist Cathy Scott saying, "Kennedy's been shot."
"No he hasn't," I groggily responded. "That was years ago."
"No, no," she insisted. "That was John Kennedy. This is Bobby. Bobby's been shot."
Yesterday, the dreadful anniversary of Bobby Kennedy's death, I channel-surfed my way to the movie Bobby, depicting the world I was growing up in and in to. I had only recently turned my political opinions away from my parents' -- opposing instead of supporting -- the Viet Nam War.
But what did I know? I was passing notes to my friends in second year French class about boys and assassinations (Martin Luther King, Jr.'s). Bhuddist monks were setting themselves aflame in public places. Race riots had only recently consumed the nation. My friends and I were negotiating adolescence during the time when those things that were changing ("the times") continue to consume our nation's attention today -- the conflicting values of the "culture wars."
The producers, director, writer and other creative forces behind "Bobby" chose to end their movie with the following speech -- On the Mindless Menace of Violence. Hearing it play out over images of Kennedy's last moments on the floor of the kitchen in the old Los Angeles Ambassador Hotel, it was as if the forty years between the night I groggily rose from my bed to watch another Kennedy brother's last moments and yesterday when I heard these words again as if for the first time had collapsed.
Bobby speaks here as plainly as he spoke to the nation then. Are we still not listening?
City Club of Cleveland, Cleveland, Ohio
April 5, 1968
This is a time of shame and sorrow. It is not a day for politics. I have saved this one opportunity, my only event of today, to speak briefly to you about the mindless menace of violence in America which again stains our land and every one of our lives.
It is not the concern of any one race. The victims of the violence are black and white, rich and poor, young and old, famous and unknown. They are, most important of all, human beings whom other human beings loved and needed. No one - no matter where he lives or what he does - can be certain who will suffer from some senseless act of bloodshed. And yet it goes on and on and on in this country of ours.
Why? What has violence ever accomplished? What has it ever created? No martyr's cause has ever been stilled by an assassin's bullet.
No wrongs have ever been righted by riots and civil disorders. A sniper is only a coward, not a hero; and an uncontrolled, uncontrollable mob is only the voice of madness, not the voice of reason.
Whenever any American's life is taken by another American unnecessarily - whether it is done in the name of the law or in the defiance of the law, by one man or a gang, in cold blood or in passion, in an attack of violence or in response to violence - whenever we tear at the fabric of the life which another man has painfully and clumsily woven for himself and his children, the whole nation is degraded.
"Among free men," said Abraham Lincoln, "there can be no successful appeal from the ballot to the bullet; and those who take such appeal are sure to lose their cause and pay the costs."
Yet we seemingly tolerate a rising level of violence that ignores our common humanity and our claims to civilization alike. We calmly accept newspaper reports of civilian slaughter in far-off lands. We glorify killing on movie and television screens and call it entertainment. We make it easy for men of all shades of sanity to acquire whatever weapons and ammunition they desire.
Too often we honor swagger and bluster and wielders of force; too often we excuse those who are willing to build their own lives on the shattered dreams of others. Some Americans who preach non-violence abroad fail to practice it here at home. Some who accuse others of inciting riots have by their own conduct invited them.
Some look for scapegoats, others look for conspiracies, but this much is clear: violence breeds violence, repression brings retaliation, and only a cleansing of our whole society can remove this sickness from our soul.
For there is another kind of violence, slower but just as deadly destructive as the shot or the bomb in the night. This is the violence of institutions; indifference and inaction and slow decay. This is the violence that afflicts the poor, that poisons relations between men because their skin has different colors. This is the slow destruction of a child by hunger, and schools without books and homes without heat in the winter.
This is the breaking of a man's spirit by denying him the chance to stand as a father and as a man among other men. And this too afflicts us all.
I have not come here to propose a set of specific remedies nor is there a single set. For a broad and adequate outline we know what must be done. When you teach a man to hate and fear his brother, when you teach that he is a lesser man because of his color or his beliefs or the policies he pursues, when you teach that those who differ from you threaten your freedom or your job or your family, then you also learn to confront others not as fellow citizens but as enemies, to be met not with cooperation but with conquest; to be subjugated and mastered.
We learn, at the last, to look at our brothers as aliens, men with whom we share a city, but not a community; men bound to us in common dwelling, but not in common effort. We learn to share only a common fear, only a common desire to retreat from each other, only a common impulse to meet disagreement with force. For all this, there are no final answers.
Yet we know what we must do. It is to achieve true justice among our fellow citizens. The question is not what programs we should seek to enact. The question is whether we can find in our own midst and in our own hearts that leadership of humane purpose that will recognize the terrible truths of our existence.
We must admit the vanity of our false distinctions among men and learn to find our own advancement in the search for the advancement of others. We must admit in ourselves that our own children's future cannot be built on the misfortunes of others. We must recognize that this short life can neither be ennobled or enriched by hatred or revenge.
Our lives on this planet are too short and the work to be done too great to let this spirit flourish any longer in our land. Of course we cannot vanquish it with a program, nor with a resolution.
But we can perhaps remember, if only for a time, that those who live with us are our brothers, that they share with us the same short moment of life; that they seek, as do we, nothing but the chance to live out their lives in purpose and in happiness, winning what satisfaction and fulfillment they can.
Surely, this bond of common faith, this bond of common goal, can begin to teach us something. Surely, we can learn, at least, to look at those around us as fellow men, and surely we can begin to work a little harder to bind up the wounds among us and to become in our own hearts brothers and countrymen once again.
Kennedy recited these lines by Aeschylus on announcing the death of Martin Luther King, Jr.
"He who learns must suffer. Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, and against our will, comes wisdom by the awful grace of God."
Racism and sexism have not taken their leave. But the fact that Barack Obama is the presumptive nominee of the Democratic Party, and that the two finalists for that prize were a black man and a white woman, are historical events of the highest importance. We should not allow ourselves to overlook the wonder of this moment.
Blog entries of note on the RFK assassination and, more particularly, on the hope and action "Bobby" inspired below:
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of disappointed shells that dropped behind.
GAS! Gas! Quick, boys!-- An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And floundering like a man in fire or lime.--
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,--
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
The Famous Trials website, the Web's largest and most visited collection of original essays, images, and primary documents pertaining to great trials, has been an ongoing project of Professor Linder's since 1996. Professor Linder has contributed book chapters, participated in video projects, and presented public speeches on the subject of historic trials.
I talk a lot in this blog about community; about the need for all of us to understand that when you drill a hole in the other guy's side of the boat, you sink too. There's something about disaster on a grand scale that brings the best out in us -- creates heroes. And maybe, if you're inclined to ask why "bad things happen to good people" the answer is that we need to be reminded of our common humanity; common fragility; and, our common obligation to serve as stewards of the planet and all life on it.
So it is with more than a small amount of pleasure that I announce the book launch for my good friend Cathy Scott's memoir of the heroic pet rescues that took place in the wake of Katrina.
Cathy was one of the "kids" in my neighborhood fom the time I was five years old until we all left the old neighborhood for our adult lives. She was also a member of the first writers' group I was ever part of -- Sisters of the Pen -- a neighborhood "club" we started when I was in the sixth grade and Cathy just entering high school.
Only Cathy has truly fulfilled the dreams of that small group of children and teenagers. This is her sixth or seventh book and the one that I just know is going to sell a million or more copies for her.
The event will be held from 1:45 p.m. - 5 p.m. at Best FriendsAnimal Sanctuary's Welcome Center (5001 Angel Canyon Road, Kanab, Utah 84741, a 3-1/2-hour drive from Las Vegas). Refreshments will be served.
On display at the Welcome Center patio deck during the event will be Ark, a full-sized replica of a flat-bottomed boat used to save animals from floodwaters. It was created by Cyrus Mejia, in-house artist and a co-founder of Best Friends . The 4-by-10-foot boat is covered in a unique collage of animal admissions forms (with rescued pets' pictures), photos from volunteers, satellite images of Katrina, maps of New Orleans and strips from pet product bags used during the rescue effort.
Volunteers from Katrina will be at the event, and many Best Friends staffers who worked in the region will be attending too, so it will very much be a reunion. While book signings are scheduled for other parts of the country (including New Orleans on the third anniversary of Katrina), this is the kick-off event and a great opportunity to visit the sanctuary.
A new Holiday Inn Express has opened in Kanab (435-644-3100), so if the sanctuary cabins and cottages or other hotels are full, the new one will probably have openings. Summer is a busy time in the area, because of nearby Zion, Bryce and the Grand Canyon, and booking early is highly recommended.
If you'd like to take a free tour of the sanctuary, which sits on 33,000 acres in Angel Canyon with about 1,800 animals on any given day, you'll need to book a reservation by calling 435-644-2001, ext. 4537. Or, for more info, go to: http://www.bestfriends.org/atthesanctuary/angelcanyon/visitorfaq.cfm
Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back-- Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one's favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamed would have come his way. Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it. Begin it now. -- Goethe
Some Days
by Billy Collins
Some days I put the people in their places at the table,
bend their legs at the knees,
if they come with that feature,
and fix them into the tiny wooden chairs.
All afternoon they face one another,
the man in the brown suit,
the woman in the blue dress,
perfectly motionless, perfectly behaved.
But other days, I am the one
who is lifted up by the ribs,
then lowered into the dining room of a dollhouse
to sit with the others at the long table.
Very funny,
but how would you like it
if you never knew from one day to the next
if you were going to spend it
striding around like a vivid god,
your shoulders in the clouds,
or sitting down there amidst the wallpaper,
staring straight ahead with your little plastic face?
And for the over 50 crowd -- Forgetfulness -- by Billy Collins
The name of the author is the first to go
followed obediently by the title, the plot,
the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel
which suddenly becomes one you have never read,
never even heard of,
as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor
decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain,
to a little fishing village where there are no phones.
Long ago you kissed the names of the nine Muses goodbye
and watched the quadratic equation pack its bag,
and even now as you memorize the order of the planets,
something else is slipping away, a state flower perhaps,
the address of an uncle, the capital of Paraguay.
Whatever it is you are struggling to remember
it is not poised on the tip of your tongue,
not even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen.
It has floated away down a dark mythological river
whose name begins with an L as far as you can recall,
well on your own way to oblivion where you will join those
who have even forgotten how to swim and how to ride a bicycle.
No wonder you rise in the middle of the night
to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war.
No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted
out of a love poem that you used to know by heart.
If you, like me, chose law as the default profession of the liberal arts major (Literature here, natch) check out our latest issue, which is full of great stuff -- more than a little of which has been written by lawyers.
Don't get me wrong -- I LOVED legal practice and am even more passionate about mediating the resolution of the type of case I litigated for 25 years -- complex commercial litigation.
NEGOTIATING the resolution of these cases is really just the final part of my legal career -- a turn in the road that I'm more than pleased to have followed, particularly as our national recession deepens.
Why? Because negotiated resolutions don't depend upon court calendars, cranky and often unpredicatable Judges (my friends on the Bench excluded) or someone else's idea (12 people good and true; three arbitrators; one Judge, etc.) of what the most beneficial and fair solution to a business problem might be.
It's all of a piece, you see, because story -- as in those written by r.kv.r.y.'scontributors -- is more important to the mediated settlement of a dispute than a litigated resolution. In mediation, we dress the "legal case" back up in all of its compelling though often messy particulars; we put the flesh and blood people back into the business problems that led them to lawyers in the first instance, permitting them do with their mutual conflict what they do best -- create a commercial solution to a business problem.
The google algorithm throws these random musings on negotiation up to me on a weekly basis because "negotiate" is one of my "google alerts." (have I said god bless google recently?)
Almost all legal writing is collaborative, so I feel this English professor's pain. I just didn't know we shared this experience.
What I’ve discovered is that when you’re writing with someone, you’re negotiating and discussing all the time. Which secondary sources to use and why; how much space a particular piece of the argument should occupy; the particular ways that data should be interpreted; style; etc. And that’s all the stuff that we actually articulate. I’d venture that there is also always a secondary level of negotiation going on non-verbally: should I just take the lead on this part?; am I slowing us down?; is my expertise relevant here?. Essentially, there are all of the interpersonal elements to negotiate as well. Is it any wonder that it takes longer than writing an article alone?
Meanwhile, note to self: next time I assign a group project to students (I’m looking at you, film class!), I need to give them ample time to work through not just content, but interpersonal stuff as well. It would probably also help if I could get them to move across the street from one another, and assign one person per group to be the baker who provides snacks for each meeting. And then someone to do the group’s laundry and grocery shopping while they get their article written—I mean project done.
And yes, Professor, it does take food, drink and clean laundry to accomplish anything worthwhile as a team! Thanks for the thoughts. Now get back to that article right now!
Allen Rostron[ and] Nancy [Levit's] . . . . series in the UMKC Law Review last year called Law Stories: Tales from Legal Practice, Experience, and Education . . . [was begun] to expand on the art of legal storytelling:
Over the last few decades, storytelling became a subject of enormous interest and controversy within the world of legal scholarship. . . Some . . . . told accounts of actual events in ways that gave voice to the experiences of outsiders. . . . [A] major textbook publisher developed a new series of books that recount the stories behind landmark cases . . . to help students appreciate not only the players in major cases, but also the social context in which cases arise. . .
Legal theorists began to recognize what historians and practicing lawyers had long known and what cognitive psychologists were just discovering - the extraordinary power of stories. Stories are the way people, including judges and jurors, understand situations. People recall events in story form. Stories are educative; they illuminate different perspectives and evoke empathy. Stories create bonds; their evocative details engage people in ways that sterile legal arguments do not.
Because . . . I [too] believe that legal storytelling is not only educative, but also a way to illuminate different perspectives, I chose to contribute this year to the Second Law Stories Series [--] Mediating the Special Education Front Lines in Mississippi [which] comes directly from my first-hand experiences as a special education mediator in Mississippi.
Professor Secunda concludes by asking whether story-telling should have a place in legal scholarship. And quite a propitious day he posed to ask the question.
Obama's speech today -- triggered by but not solely given to address questions about inflammatory statements made by his pastor from the pulpit -- was grounded in story. Why? Because only the texture, detail, ambiguity, contradiction, and paradox of actual "lived experience" at a particular time and in a specific place, is capable of approaching the "truth" of the human predicament. Where does story start? Classically, with one's his birth and lineage.
I am the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas. I was raised with the help of a white grandfather who survived a Depression to serve in Patton’s Army during World War II and a white grandmother who worked on a bomber assembly line at Fort Leavenworth while he was overseas. I’ve gone to some of the best schools in America and lived in one of the world’s poorest nations. I am married to a black American who carries within her the blood of slaves and slaveowners – an inheritance we pass on to our two precious daughters. I have brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, uncles and cousins, of every race and every hue, scattered across three continents, and for as long as I live, I will never forget that in no other country on Earth is my story even possible.
Giving to Airy Nothings/A Local Habitation and a Name
By beginning with autobiography, by taking the time to tell his wholly personal yet universal story, Obama does what Shakespeare said all writers must do -- "give[] to airy nothings/a local habitation and a name." No single snapshot, no view from 30,000 feet, no abstract and colorless (or "colored") everyman can do much more than to "simplify and stereotype and amplify the negative to the point that it distorts reality."
We should long have known that only a bi-racial man might be permitted to take the national stage to address "white" demoralization with as much forcefulness as "black" misery; to describe "black" and "white" anger with equal understanding; to say that "[m]ost working- and middle-class white Americans don't feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race."
Their experience is the immigrant experience – as far as they’re concerned, no one’s handed them anything, they’ve built it from scratch. They’ve worked hard all their lives, many times only to see their jobs shipped overseas or their pension dumped after a lifetime of labor. They are anxious about their futures, and feel their dreams slipping away; in an era of stagnant wages and global competition, opportunity comes to be seen as a zero sum game, in which your dreams come at my expense. So when they are told to bus their children to a school across town; when they hear that an African American is getting an advantage in landing a good job or a spot in a good college because of an injustice that they themselves never committed; when they’re told that their fears about crime in urban neighborhoods are somehow prejudiced, resentment builds over time.
To acknowledge that
for the men and women of Reverend Wright’s generation, the memories of humiliation and doubt and fear have not gone away; nor has the anger and the bitterness of those years. That anger may not get expressed in public, in front of white co-workers or white friends. But it does find voice in the barbershop or around the kitchen table. At times, that anger is exploited by politicia ns, to gin up votes along racial lines, or to make up for a politician’s own failings.
And occasionally it finds voice in the church on Sunday morning, in the pulpit and in the pews. . . . . That anger is not always productive . . . But [it] is real; it is powerful; and to simply wish it away, to condemn it without understanding its roots, only serves to widen the chasm of misunderstanding that exists between the races.
So Where Do We Begin?
Story, for Obama, is not simply a way to approach the difficult truth. It is the instrument to cauterize our wounds; the weapon with which to resist the easy answer and the politically "correct" response.
Just as black anger often proved counterproductive, so have . . . white resentments distracted attention from the real culprits of the middle class squeeze – . . . . And yet, to wish away the resentments of white Americans, to label them as misguided or even racist, without recognizing they are grounded in legitimate concerns – this too widens the racial divide, and blocks the path to understanding.
This is where we are right now. It’s a racial stalemate we’ve been stuck in for years.
So where do we begin?
With story.
"There is a young, twenty-three year old white woman named Ashley Baia who organized for our campaign in Florence, South Carolina," Obama concludes.
She had been working to organize a mostly African-American community since the beginning of this campaign, and one day she was at a roundtable discussion where everyone went around telling their story and why they were there.
And Ashley said that when she was nine years old, her mother got cancer. And because she had to miss days of work, she was let go and lost her health care. They had to file for bankruptcy, and that’s when Ashley decided that she had to do something to help her mom.
She knew that food was one of their most expensive costs, and so Ashley convinced her mother that what she really liked and really wanted to eat more than anything else was mustard and relish sandwiches. Because that was the cheapest way to eat.
She did this for a year until her mom got better, and she told everyone at the roundtable that the reason she joined our campaign was so that she could help the millions of other children in the country who want and need to help their parents too. . . .
. . . Ashley finishes her story and then goes around the room and asks everyone else why they’re supporting the campaign. They all have different stories and reasons. Many bring up a specific issue. And finally they come to this elderly black man who’s been sitting there quietly the entire time. And Ashley asks him why he’s there. And he does not bring up a specific issue. He does not say health care or the economy. He does not say education or the war. He does not say that he was there because of Barack Obama. He simply says to everyone in the room, “I am here because of Ashley.”
“I’m here because of Ashley.”
The recognition that we are involved, engaged, hopeful, willing, motivated, cheered, encouraged, and made more courageous because we have connected with one specific textured, multi-dimensional, storied human being, is not, Obama admits "enough."
If the political season(s) have gotten too serious for you, check out I've Got a Crush on Obama below.
Moment of Nostalgia: When I was in high school, I was too frightened to compete in the impromtu or extemporary speech categories and too lazy to prepare all those 3x5 cards for debate. Therefore I competed in state-wide speech tournaments through the National Forensic League in three categories -- humorous and dramatic interpretation and oratorical analysis. Drama and close-textual analysis.
The Real Purpose of this Post: Now you have the chance to view a high-level oratorical analysis (a New York Times video) about Obama's oratory with John McWhorter of the Manhattan Institute and Megan McArdle of The Atlantic.
The bottom line here on Barack vs. Hillary is Preacher vs. Policy Paper.
It's well worth your time to view the video because the Preacher is a trial attorney's style and Policy Paper the litigator's style. We're good at both. We just need to choose our style to fit our audience -- Judge or Jury?
And if you're in the business of persuading mediators or your bargainiing partner at a mediation? A little bit of both. Policy paper with the mediator and in attorney-to-attorney negotiations. Preacher in joint session or in mediator-orchestrated meetings between parties and attorneys.
In the middle of the journey of our life I came to myself within a dark wood where the straight way was lost. Dante Alighieri
When the journey turns from litigation to mediation, it's helpful to remember that we litigators are classic Hollywood hyphenates -- the writers-directors-actors of our client's story -- and that our client has generally moved more and more into the background as the "executive" producer, i.e., the money guy with the power of the final cut.
Since we've been building our narratives of right and wrong, good and evil, black and white for a pretty long time before mediation rolls around, it's good for us -- as authors of our clients' morality tales -- to step back for a moment and observe the inevitable structure of the litigation "story" we've been so busy writing.
For full article, click on the link above. The excerpt below concerns the standard litigation narrative that we make our living writing.
Let's start as [legal] narrative itself starts, with the Steady State and the Trouble that upsets the Steady State: The world is in order. People are acting towards each other as they should, or at least no one is straying too far from the norm. And then . . . something happens. One party claims that another party did something to generate disorder, to make the world out of joint. In other words, Trouble disrupts the Steady State.
In a breach of contract case, the parties enter into a contract (Steady State) and then one party breaches the contract (Trouble). In a tort case, plaintiff is walking on the sidewalk (Steady State) and then slips and falls (Trouble), or plaintiff is having a beer (Steady State) and then defendant slugs plaintiff (Trouble). In a criminal case, a bank is doing what banks ordinarily do (Steady State) and then is held up by a defendant armed with a gun (Trouble).
The defendant claims either that: 1) nothing happened, and an attempt to demonstrate otherwise is itself an example of disorder and thus of Trouble, and/or 2) something did happen to generate disorder, but it was the other party that did it.
So who is right and who is wrong, . . . . who is the real source of Trouble? The assumption that one party is right and one party is wrong is not open to question; litigation is based on a shared norm among all participants (litigants, judge, jury) that only one of the litigants is right about "what happened." Since there is only one true source of Trouble, parties expend Efforts to demonstrate to the finder of fact that their story is the "right" one.
These Efforts are subsumed within the procedures of litigation itself. Parties are successful in their Efforts to the extent the judge (or jury) decides that the origins of Trouble are as a party claims. Thus, the end result of successful Efforts is that a judge or jury Restores the Steady State by granting relief to the party whose version of Trouble is the right one.
To recapitulate, parties first come to litigation with divergent versions of Trouble. The court's job is to finish the story the "right" way so that a party's story makes sense. A bare bones representation of this narrative scheme would be as follows:
Joe's Story Steady State [already happened]: Dave and I were talking.
Trouble [already happened]: Dave punched me.
Efforts [is happening]: I am showing and will show that Dave owes me money for my injuries.
Restoration of Steady State [should happen]: Dave pays me money.
Coda [should happen]: Justice is done.
Dave's Story Steady State [already happened]: Joe and I were talking.
Trouble [already happened]: Joe swung his arm to punch me. As a reflex, I hit him.
Efforts [is happening]: I am showing and will show that this case must be dismissed.
Restoration of Steady State [should happen]: This case is dismissed.
Coda [should happen]: Justice is done.
Once the litigation is concluded, the "true" plot of the story can now be told completely and definitively. Either Joe's right, or Dave's right, or some combination thereof is right. Such a story - its fuzziness and indeterminacy stripped away - is familiar to every first-year law student . . . .
Even this brief tour highlights an important dimension of litigation. The engine that drives litigation is a kind of anxiety about story completion. "Facts" need to be "found." The goal of an advocate is to persuade the decision-maker that the advocate's story is the right one, and if the advocate's story is the right one, then the "ending" - that is, the Restoration or Transformation of the Steady State - flows from it. In this sense, the Efforts are a contest about who caused the Trouble, and "finding" who did determines what the proper Restoration should be.
The Mediation Narrative from Professor Rubinson's article tomorrow.
O.K., they're not exactly articles. They're posts. It's much much easier to write a post than it is to write an article (N.B. IP ADR BLOGGERS!!!)
Maybe it's just me, but I get more miles per gallon out of reading a blog post than an article.
Why?
First, I'm just generally more interested in people's subjective experience than I am in people's opinions about how things are or should be.
This is the primary difference between an article and a blog post. An article is usually filled with facts and opinions. Period. If a post contains facts and opinions, it expresses them through the writer's unique set of experiences -- through the writer's subjectivity.
You don't have to be convinced by a poster's opinion -- you get to experience it. Then you can accept or reject it on its own terms. As an old Lit major, that's pretty much how I live in the world -- subjectively.
As the poet Galway Kinnell once explained, if you express your personal, unique, individual experience truly enough, you become the voice of a creature on the planet speaking. The more subjective your experience, the more universal it is.
I'm writing this post because I'm celebrating 100 blog posts over at Mediate.com.
I'm celebrating 100 because I like round numbers, birthdays, anniversaries and turning points.
This year, for example, I want to net six figures. It's nice and round and substantial. And because I'm doing what I love to do (mediating) instead of simply what I'm good at (practicing law) six figures will be quite enough for me until I'm shuffled off to the old folks' home. Where I'm hoping, by the way, to reach 100 in good health so I can blog about whatever it is that holds the attention and sparks the passion of someone at the century mark.
Thanks for reading. There are about 80,000 of you a year now. I know that's not much on an internet where Lonely Girl 15 gets 25,000 "hits" a day, but it's a lot of people interested in my little niche -- negotiating the settlement of commercial litigation -- not to mention my experience of that niche.
I often find myself explaining lawyers to their clients and clients to their attorneys. Here are some typical client complaints I hear about their litigator attorneys:
he tells me to forget about the most important losses I've suffered
she keeps editing my story
I don't understand why I can't . . . i.e., recover my attorneys' fees or cross-complain, etc.
he wouldn't let me tell the mediator everything I wanted to
she didn't let me talk to the other side
And here are the typical litigator complaints I hear about clients:
his expectations of success or recovery are commpletely unrealistic
if I tell her the weaknesses of her case, she says I've become the enemy
I've explained the limitations of the case to him, but he just doesn't seem to understand
Translating the Law into Justice -- An Explanation for Clients
The chart above and photos below are simple ways to explain to clients the gap between the law and justice. Sample explanation --
The dispute you're having exists in the world of injustice.
Picture the earth.
Now picture a grain of rice somewhere on the earth.
The grain of rice represents the injustices the law will remedy.
The earth represents the injustices the law will not.
Square Pegs in Round Holes -- An Explanation of the "Legal Story" for Clients
It feels like your attorney is "editing" or shaping or "spinning" your story of injustice because she is. The yellow square represents the facts necessary to obtain relief in court (damages, an injunction, etc.). It also represents the facts necessary to defeat your opponent's claim for relief.
The entire dispute -- everything that happened inside the green circle -- is generally what you, the client, want to resolve.
IT OFTEN INCLUDES FACTS THAT WOULD BE HARMFUL TO YOUR CASE.
That's why your attorney doesn't let you talk in the presence of the "other side" and asks you not to discuss the dispute with your opponent anymore. Because you might reveal something in the green area that's bad for proving your case in the yellow area.
THE MEDIATION ZONE -- AN EXPLANATION FOR ATTORNEYS AND THEIR CLIENTS
Mediators work in the green area. Clients almost always want to resolve all of the issues raised by the dispute, not simply the "legal" ones. Perhaps more importantly, there are many opportunities for resolution in the green mediation zone that no one has yet seriously explored because the green zone is not the focus of the legal action. Only the yellow legal zone is.
Mediation restores the dispute to the people who have it. They are the only ones who know and understand that dispute in all its detail, texture, dimension and meaning. Party interests -- their hopes, fears, desires, needs, etc. -- exist in both zones. The good news of mediation is that the party interests outside the legal zone can often be traded for concessions that are in or out of it.
When you have only one currency to negotiate with -- dollars -- you often reach impasse. Why? Because it seems so unfair to both parties that they should give in, compromise, split the baby in half, etc. just because the cost and aggravation of getting to trial is so high.
When you have more than one currency to negotiate with, however, like dollars and "face" or dollars and unexplored business opportunities or dollars and apology, or dollars and an explanation for the dispute's events that has the ring of truth, you can trump legal impasse with party interests.
Writing on a Grain of Rice
Vendors who line beach boardwalks or the sidewalks of tourist towns often include the guy who will write your name on a grain of rice. HERE!!!
Sometimes I feel as if my entire career as a litigator was written on a grain of rice -- that's how small the legal zone sometimes looks from here. It's O.K., though. Litigation isn't just a job or even just a career. It's a calling, this business of rights and remedies, of following a rule of law instead of a strong arm or the snake-oil's charm.
As the poet Lao Tzu wrote,
whether a man dispassionately
Sees to the core of life
Or passionately
Sees the surface,
The core and the surface
Are essentially the same,
Words make them seem different
Only to express appearance.
If name be needed, wonder names them both:
From wonder into wonder
Existence opens.
If you're a writer -- you know -- of fiction -- and you somewhat compulsively track your blog statistics because, well, you don't smoke cigarettes anymore, your blogging day doesn't start any better than this.
Search google.com (sue step mother for wrongful death)
The mind reels with the possibilities. But I have paperwork to do.
The video, for those with procrastination in mind, takes about as long to watch as stepping outside to smoke a cigarette would. And "stop smoking" was one of your New Year's resolutions, right?
On Sunday, a federal mediator made a last big push to avert the strike. The Writers Guild made one big eleventh-hour concession, dropping its insistence on a doubling of royalties from DVD sales but that was not matched by anything substantial enough from the producers to clinch a deal.
After three months of contract negotiations, which never entirely looked like producing an agreement, both sides are extraordinarily well prepared. The writers have commandeered 300 strike captains on both coasts who will direct pickets and other protests, and have amassed a strike fund of about $12.5m (£7m)which they will farm out in the form of loans to the neediest writers and their families.
If you're hanging out a shingle after graduation (see Carolyn Elefant's brilliantly useful MyShingle here) just getting the clerk to accept your pleadings is probably your greatest concern.
But if you've entered the ranks of the AmLaw100, you're about to make or break your career on your writing skills.
The good news/bad news according to Guberman is you have a job/now you're able to lose it.
Why?
At most law firms, associates think writing is their greatest strength, while the partners think writing is the associates' greatest weakness.
Chalk this up to a generation gap if you like, but the partner you're writing for has the power to put you on the type of case you want to be litigating with the people you like working with.
And this has what to do with negotiation?
You negotiate every day of your working life for plum assignments, week-ends off (maybe next year), bonuses, salary, and access to power.
We cannot mention often enough negotiation's bottom line -- your bargaining partner's Better Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement ("BATNA"). What does your preferred bargaining partner (the firm shareholder with the right practice and the most firm power?) want and need?
A great writer on his/her team.
When it comes time to for you seek favors, concessions and bonuses, your "target" partner's BATNA is using or cultivating an associate who is better than you. If you're the best writer in the first year associate ranks, the concessions you seek should always be a better alternative to losing you.
And no, the Kerouac'ian stream of consciousness, wonderful as it is, will not work here.
Negotiation is marketing is sales is negotiation is marketing . . .
So what's Radiohead got to do with it? According to the Church of the Customer, greater access to consumer information and, of course, generating demand.
Of more benefit to them now is building a database of buyers, bypassing the information black hole of so many retail channels. That's the value exchange.
And in a few months, Radiohead will partner with a label, which will manufacture a CD of the album. If the album is great (always a non-quantitative variable when it comes to art), it will have already created demand for the totem version of the album.
If scarcity isn't your primary method for generating demand, then getting your product or service into as many hands, mouths and minds possible is. The ideas, products or services that spread the most usually win.
Today and more so tomorrow, that means letting go of the control you're accustomed to.
Monica, a gentle and innocent soul, is worried about her Dad, "Paolo," a tortured artist. After years of seeing his value as an artist decline, Paolo is desperate for his acerbic art dealer, Channing (TERI GARR), to give him one last shot. If he can only keep sweet, albeit slow, Monica, from interrupting their meeting with her abundance of baked goods. However, it's Monica's ability to see beauty in everything, that makes this day unlike any other day.
This month brings us interviews with two mediators -- Geoff Sharp -- who talks about his mediation practice and yours truly, who talks about, what else, business and practice development while wearing my literary writer and editor's hat.
To whet the appetites of my mediator readers, here's a snippet of Geoff's advice about being a mediation chameleon.
Gini: Do you have a “conflict resolution hero,” and if so, who and why?
Geoff: Yes I do. It is the chameleon. I have always thought that mediators are natural chameleons. Good mediators can’t have egos, or at least they can’t bring them into the room, and they must to some extent mould themselves on the day to the environment they find . . . To me that is all to do with being self aware, reflective and having very good antennae to know what and how one should present. If not the chameleon it is a little pig out at our bit of dirt just north of Wellington here in New Zealand. This little black kune pig lives with about five horses in a field. I think it thinks it’s a horse. It regularly intervenes when there is a problem between horses. It is a bit like George Orwell’s Animal Farm!
To read the rest of Gini's interview with Geoff, click here.
I am the crazy glue on the soles of your sneakers that keeps you committed to your book, your project, your Big Idea. I'm the kick in the pants you wish you had nine months ago when you birthed that Big Idea in the first place. I'm equal parts left-brain, right-brain and I have three words for all you lurking, burning, idea-crazed writers, entrepreneurs and dreamers: Someday is now.
Because I'm the editor of a literary journal and a writer when I'm not mediating or blogging, and because Lisa liked my journal (thanks Lisa!) she interviewed me about pursuing ones writing dreams, which the journal surely is for me.
Because mediators are also pursuing a dream, I provide a little bit of the interview with Lisa here. If this excerpt interests you at all, you can find the entire interview on Lisa's blog here.
Lisa: How do you market or carve out your niche in the literary journal landscape?
Vickie: You just start networking. I was innocent. I downloaded Yahoo's free internet-design program, taught myself to use it and am continuing to use it to this day. I think the website costs me about $20/month and the ad in Poets & Writers costs $60 every other month. I just do it.
That's what I've learned since '04 about everything in life. You just start the thing. You take a single step in the direction of a dream and another the next day, and the one after that. Things begin to grow. People start to hear about you or tell their friends or post something on a blog like you're doing. You become a kind of attractor. I'm not new age so you'll have to understand that what I'm about to say is truly metaphoric and not a concrete belief.
I think the power of intention coupled with action creates a kind of force that becomes bigger than you are, and everything you've ever done aligns with that intention and becomes part of the engine of the dream.
I think both Geoff and I would say, whatever your dream, go for it!
Right, the famous New Yorker cover of September 24, 2001. Clicking on the cover will link you to Anthony Lane's article of that same date, This is Not a Movie,
When we are speechless, as I am about this event and the world events that followed, I turn to poetry.
And death shall have no dominion.
Dead men naked they shall be one
With the man in the wind and the west moon;
When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone,
They shall have stars at elbow and foot;
Though they go mad they shall be sane,
Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;
Though lovers be lost love shall not;
And death shall have no dominion.
And death shall have no dominion.
Under the windings of the sea
They lying long shall not die windily;
Twisting on racks when sinews give way,
Strapped to a wheel, yet they shall not break;
Faith in their hands shall snap in two,
And the unicorn evils run them through;
Split all ends up they shan't crack;
And death shall have no dominion.
And death shall have no dominion.
No more may gulls cry at their ears
Or waves break loud on the seashores;
Where blew a flower may a flower no more
Lift its head to the blows of the rain;
Though they be mad and dead as nails,
Heads of the characters hammer through daisies;
Break in the sun till the sun breaks down,
And death shall have no dominion.
(illustration, left, links to Ms. Modan's web site)
It's worth subscribing to New York Times Select just to be reminded that Rutan Modan is out there doing this great genre-breaking illustrated blog that, being about family, is always about conflict resolution.
Today, in Queen of the Scottish Fairies, Modan grapples with the politics of gender-identity, principles of self-expression, and the way in which we attempt to control the behavior of those we most love in an effort to protect our own self-image.
It's a story as old as time with a solution that is as good as can be imagined in a fallible world full of fallible people, reflecting e.e. cummings' shrewd observation that
[t]o be nobody-but-yourself---in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else--- means to fight hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting."
I urge you to CLICK HERE IMMEDIATELY for the most extreme and hilarious family "negotiation" (read: manipulation) tactics ever to flow from a pen (with marvelous illustrations) from a Blog you'll immediately want to add to your Blogroll: Mixed Emotions by Rutu Modan.
This is a New York Times Blog (don't worry, fellow amateurs, the BigBloggers have to appeal to a much wider audience) which describes its author as follows:
Rutu Modan, an illustrator and comic book creator, is a chosen artist of the Israel Cultural Excellence Foundation. She has done comic strips for the Israeli newpapers Yedioth Acharonot and Ma’ariv and illustrations for The New Yorker, Le Monde, The New York Times and many other publications. Her first graphic novel, Exit Wounds, will be published in June. Ms. Modan, usually based in Tel Aviv, is currently in Sheffield, England.
And if you want to off-set this dark whimsey with a little practical know-how from the smartest guys in the room, here's the Harvard Business School Working Knowledge article, Five Steps to Better Family Negotiations.
Get CLEs and CEUs in Santa Fe, NM at a conference exploring the blind spots and biases of being human, with a pre-conference Transformative Mediation training option!
Register online now for the 2½-day Science, Ethics, and Spirit Conference, September 26-28, 2007
We’ll explore and experience the facts and implications of science, ethics and spirit in your high conflict professional practices as attorneys, facilitators and mediators, with presentations by:
Register, too, for the pre-conference Transformative Mediation training September 24-25, 2007
Kristine Paranica will present the training for the Institute for the Study of Conflict Transformation (ISCT), a national think-tank supported by a consortium of universities.
Both events will take place in Santa Fe, NM, at the Upaya Zen Center, where you are urged to interact with the Center's diverse residential community of monks and lay people. You are also welcome to arrange to lodge at the Upaya Zen Center while in Santa Fe.
Other events in Santa Fe at the time include the 17th Annual Santa Fe Wine and Chile Fiesta (September 26-30) and the High Road Art Tour, exploring the arts and culture in the mountain villages of Northern New Mexico on the high road to Taos between Santa Fe & Taos (September 23-23, and 29-30).
Conflict is . . . is simply the sound made by the cracks in a system, a boundary condition that can best be resolved by communicating across the many internal and external borders we have erected to keep ourselves safe, or exclude others. --- Ken Cloke, President, Mediators without Borders, Committing Personally, Acting Globally.
Having recently been (somewhat justifiably) skewered by the law students taking my ADR Employment Class for bluntly telling them that they couldn't write, I must admit that the following reprint, called to my attention by Digg, helped soothe the wounds of student evaluations.
But before reprinting an excerpt from the Times article: What Corporate America Can't Build, a Sentence, I have to tell you what I told my Business Law students when I was teaching undergrads in the mid-'80's. If you can't write a coherent essay, how could I possibly grade your understanding of the subject? In fact, you come to understand the subject in the process of writing about it coherently. They didn't like it either.
BLOOMINGTON, Ill. - R. Craig Hogan, a former university professor who heads an online school for business writing here, received an anguished e-mail message recently from a prospective student.
"i need help," said the message, which was devoid of punctuation. "i am writing a essay on writing i work for this company and my boss want me to help improve the workers writing skills can yall help me with some information thank you".
Hundreds of inquiries from managers and executives seeking to improve their own or their workers' writing pop into Dr. Hogan's computer in-basket each month, he says, describing a number that has surged as e-mail has replaced the phone for much workplace communication. Millions of employees must write more frequently on the job than previously. And many are making a hash of it.
"E-mail is a party to which English teachers have not been invited," Dr. Hogan said. "It has companies tearing their hair out."
A recent survey of 120 American corporations reached a similar conclusion. The study, by the National Commission on Writing, a panel established by the College Board, concluded that a third of employees in the nation's blue-chip companies wrote poorly and that businesses were spending as much as $3.1 billion annually on remedial training.
plants grown alongside unrelated neighbours are more competitive than those growing with their siblings — ploughing more energy into growing roots when their neighbours don't share their genetic stock.
Plants 'know' more about their environment than they are often given credit for: they can sense the presence of neighbouring plants through changes in water or nutrients available to them or through chemical cues in the soil, and can adjust their own growth accordingly. "That plants have a secret social life is something well known to plant ecologists," says Dudley.
But the ability to recognize kin has not been demonstrated before.
I suspect that just as we humans are hard-wired to both compete and cooperate (see Unhappy Lawyers and the Cooperative Hard-Wire) so are plants. Because I don't know that, I ask any botanists within shouting distance to weigh in.
For an anthropologist on Mars look at reading the Bible, check out Julia Sweeney's hilarious and touching Letting Go of God. And for a modern and deeply felt re-interpretation of the story of Cain and Abel, listen to Am I My Brother's Keeper, also a This American Life classic, by Jonathan Goldstein.
And finally, for a set of compelling audio programs on religion and dispute resolution, click here.
A couple of years ago, a friend bought me the 150th Anniversary Edition of Walden – a text I hadn’t read since high school. While building his spartan but serviceable cabin in the woods, Thoreau does a cost-benefit analysis of home ownership, calculating that “an average house . . . costs perhaps eight hundred dollars, and to lay up this sum will take from ten to fifteen years of the laborer's life.”
The thing, as we were taught in law school, speaks for itself. Or as Thoreau put it, “the cost of a thing is the amount of life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.”
This line stopped me dead in my tracks. Was this phrase more profound to me than the observation that “time is money” just because it appeared in 19th Century prose? Or had I simply lived too much of my life converting my own time into money, shaving hours into tenths, merging them weekly, monthly and yearly with my colleagues’ hours, converting the whole at year’s end into overhead, earnings, distributions and investments.
Whatever the reason, Thoreau's calculus made me suddenly recognize that the sheer raw number of my actual yearly wage had become more important to me than the things it might allow me to purchase, or even to store up against potential future calamity. In all the getting and gathering, I thought, I may have lost the point of job, career, occupation.
And this has to do with mediation in what way?
I often quote Thoreau's aphorism when parties reach impasse. It helps everyone make money transparent again. That money is the means to particular end, not an end in itself. That, even in this cynical age, most people would prefer a fair distribution of resources reached through compromise than total victory at all costs. This continues to mark my own experiences as a mediator, despite the fact that the justice survey is continuing to run 50-50 on the question, "would you prefer to win unfairly or lose fairly."
So as strange as it might seem, I heartily recommend Walden as one of the tomes you tote to the beach this summer along with your soda pop, sandwiches, cole slaw and sun screen.
Brought to us by Tracey Broderick, the blog's mission is to bring you people's stories about their personal encounters with the justice system. As Tracey explains:
In this case is a blog of personal stories about the American legal system. If you’ve gone through a divorce or served on a jury, you have a story. If you’ve served time or argued in court, you have a story. Any personal experience with the law can be a story. These stories show when the law does and doesn’t work; how it angers and inspires us. They describe the law and what it means to us all living our modern lives here in our country. This blog brings these stories together so we can hear each other.
I edit the stories. Some are sent to me; some are drawn from interviews with people who want to talk in person. I keep each story as true as possible to the words and voice of each person. If you have a story for the blog, please let me know–I love to help people be heard.
This blog should be required reading for anyone interested in justice issues -- attorneys, law professors, local, state and federal government officials, probation officers, therapists, social workers, arbitrators, mediators, police, sheriffs, bailiffs, judges, court reporters (the stenographers of raw American conflict), students of the criminal and civil justice systems, law students, activists, preachers, teachers, spouses, people who would like to be spouses, people who are tired of being spouses, parents, and children over the age of consent . . . . . gee, I think that means everyone.
Let me rephrase. This blog should be required reading for everyone. It's a small but powerful exercise in little "d" democracy. The kind that grows from the ground up. Not the kind that is brought to you by foreign lands at the point of a gun.
And following Tracey's example, I too will henceforth give credit to the myriad flickr photographers whose photos I use more than once a grateful day of my year.
Slight digression for moment of nostalgia and copyright notice.
This (right) is my favoriteFiresign theater album. I heard it for the first time on FM radio in high school while vacuuming the living room floor (yes, young people used to do these chores).
It led to harder comedy.
Note to subsequent generations of young people -- FT's comedy remains hilarious and does not age with time.
From Wikipedia: this image is of a music album . . . and the copyright for it is most likely owned by either the publisher of the album or the artist(s) which produced the music or artwork in question. It is believed that the use of low-resolution images of album . . . solely to illustrate the album . . . in question . . . qualifies as fair use under United States copyright law. Any other uses of this image, on Wikipedia or elsewhere, may be copyright infringement. See Wikipedia:Fair use for more information.
OK, I blew the entire post on that.
Part III (3) Three on Step IV (4) Four from the Lax & Sebenius article, The Art of the Best Deal follows.
Stephanie West Allen at Idealawg has tagged me and eleven others to respond to Alex Shalman's Gotta Get Goals by "list[ing] and writ[ing] about the top 5 to 10 goals that you gotta’ get so that you can truly say you have achieved your wildest dreams in life. These have to be your best, most exclusive, and over-the-top goals that you can pick off your goals list."
I'm thinking, SHOOT!! I already write about myself too much, but Stephanie is one of my favorite people so I hate to disappoint her on this meme. Therefore, you can skip this post as more blather from the most narcissistic person on the planet or read my top ten.
The casual observer may not think these goals much to hope for, but if I achieve them, I will have achieved more than I ever believed possible and will die a happy woman.
to stay sober and help other alcoholics to achieve sobriety; this is my primary purpose; everything else is gravy.
when I say "stay sober," I mean, to maintain a peaceful and loving balance in my life no matter what my circumstances -- to be content and of service in a war zone, a jail cell, a hospital and on my death bed.
to make a difference in the world, every day, one person at a time.
to be awake, present, to my experience and compassionate to that of others.
to continue to overcome those defects in my character that keep me from being of service.
to be self-supporting through my own contributions.
to be humble and more even-tempered.
to express myself creatively without pretense, desire for fame or hope of financial reward.
to know myself, my strengths and my limitations.
to contribute to my family, my friends and my community at the highest level possible without self-aggrandizement or need of reward.
In the words of the poet Mary Oliver, I want to be able to say
all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.
When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.
I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.
Most of the poets and writers I publish are strangers to me. They find the journal primarily through Poets & Writers Magazine, which has an inexpensive classified ad section. Or they know other people who already published in r.kv.r.y. Having the journal allows me to publish the work of my friends, all of whom are better poets than I. Joe Mockus and Richard Wirick, for instance, whose work I've recently mentioned and who only happen to both be attorneys.
The best thing about writing poetry, for an amateur like me, is that it slows the world down. It makes me look more carefully. It sends me to the bookstore to purchase Audubon Guides to the trees, flowers and birds I've never learned by name. Curlew, whimbrel, nuthatch, and, yes, even booby, brown and blue-footed (sula leucogaster and nebouxii) for those times when your poem needs a little whimsey. Sycamore, hawthorne and laurelcherry trees. Valerian, elder, thistle and honeysuckle. It recalls the time when people had the time to notice and name the world around them.
As Shakespeare famously wrote: a poet gives to airy nothings a local habitation and a name.
The second best thing about writing poetry in mid-life is reading it again. Kinnell and Creeley. Berrigan, Bishop and Bukowski. Wright and Collins and Neruda. Dickinson, cummings, Levertov and Auden. Merwin, Sexton and Graham. You could live your entire life inside the poems of just this handful of great 20th Century poets.
This is a lazy Saturday post, waiting for my husband to arrive home from New York City. And before the cleaning and shopping for Monday's Seder begins.
The business of lawyers is words. Their precise meaning. How they function, alone and together. Sometimes a comma makes all the difference between winning and losing a case. Once, for a few tens of millions of dollars, one of my partners asked the Court of Appeal to rule that the word "sudden" meant "quick," not "gradual." (case mentioned here)
No kidding.
And everyone was worried about the outcome.
So the law is a poet's profession. Or, poets gravitate toward the law because, unlike poets, lawyers get paid to write.
My old college friend Joe Mockus is also on Professor Elkins web site. Joe is a criminal defense attorney in Oakland (Garcia, Schnayerson & Mockus) whose firm once represented Jello Biafra of the Dead Kennedys in a Free Speech case (listen to Biafra chat with prosecutor Guardino on an episode of This American Life here). Joe's one of the best poets I know. But he doesn't send his work out and I have to beg him for it so I can publish him in the literary journal I edit, the r.kv.r.y. quarterly. You can find Joe's poems here and here.
I am more indebted to poetry than I could ever tell you unless we were chatting over a latte and I was talking too much.
Enjoy the Billy Collins. The poetry alone is wonderful -- touching. The videos are amazing. Thank you YouTube for putting the means of distribution into the hands of the artists.
I cannot resist also giving you The Best Cigarette Poem Video. Hypnotic.
"In one respect I'll thy assistant be," he says of the upcoming secret nuptials, "for this alliance may so happy prove, to turn your households rancour to pure love." (Act 2, Scene 3).
It's hard not to have one's hope slightly buoyed by this symbolic gesture.
is a university student from a storied Sunni tribe, the groom a technician at an Iraqi cellphone company and the son of a prominent Shiite tribal leader. It could almost be a Baghdad version of Romeo and Juliet but with a twist--the marriage was arranged by their parents, in part as a willful symbol of defiance against the sectarian violence that has riven Iraq.
The unlikely nuptials might appear to be a doomed gesture in a place where tension between Sunnis and Shiites seems to keep escalating with random killings and tit-for-tat retaliations. Shiite families have been chased out of suddenly unfriendly Sunni neighborhoods, and vice versa. The sectarian strife has been aggravated by growing confusion over the loyalty of Iraq's Shiite-dominated security forces and a months-long delay in forming a new government.
But the wedding also serves as a reminder of the complexity of the Iraqi mosaic, where Sunnis and Shiites have long been deeply interwoven. Not long ago, a Sunni-Shiite wedding would have been unremarkable. But in today's Baghdad, it is a brave and fraught venture. For these two families, it also means wrestling with the uncertain future of their troubled nation--and placing what amounts to a high-stakes bet that, in part because of events like this one, Iraq will not descend into a full-fledged civil war.
For the full account, click on the title of the article above.
Baz Luhrmann's hallucinatory Romeo and Juliet, the ultimate Shakesperean lesson in the dangers of fiercely playing Tit for Tat.
The Americans are fond of explaining almost all the actions of their lives by the principle of self-interest rightly understood. In this respect I think they frequently fail to do themselves justice. -- Alexis de Tocqueville
We've mentioned these principles before:
negotiators will reflexively play the childhood game of tit for tat (you cooperate, I cooperate; you defect, I punish; you cooperate, I cooperate again) because, as the game theorists tell us, we evolved as a human society as a result;
The point of the following excerpts from Professor Gintis' research is this -- what negotiators tend to call irrational bargaining behavior -- not accepting an objectively "good deal" -- is not necessarily irrational or "overly emotional." It is simply driven by considerations that hard numbers do not explain.
Gintis explains:
The inequality-averse individual is willing to reduce his own payoff to increase the degree of equality in the group (whence widespread support for charity and social welfare programs). But he is especially displeased when placed on the losing side of an unequal relationship.
How could this not be true? At ten, I was reduced to sobs by the fate of a sled dog in Call of the Wild; longed to eat peppermints on a Brooklyn fire escape near the tree growing there; watched Atlanta burn with reddened eyes by flashlight while my sister slept peacefully in the next bed; and, came of age in sunny suburban San Diego reading Anne Frank's desperate hopes for a new life in her family's hiding place.
Now the British Psychological Society tells us what every Lit Major has always known, "the more fiction a person reads, the more empathy they have." Not only that, but
the better they perform on tests of social understanding and awareness. By contrast, reading more non-fiction, fact-based books shows the opposite association. That’s according to Raymond Mar and colleagues who say their finding could have implications for educating children and adults about understanding others.
Finding out how much people read is always difficult because it’s socially desirable for people to report that they read a lot. Mar and colleagues avoided this by asking 94 participants to identify the names of fiction and non-fiction authors embedded in a long list of names that also included non-authors. Prior research has shown this test correlates well with how much people actually read. Among the authors listed were Matt Ridley, Naomi Wolf (non-fiction), Toni Morrison and PD James (fiction).
The more authors of fiction that a participant recognised, the higher they tended to score on measures of social awareness and tests of empathy – for example being able to recognise a person’s emotions from a picture showing their eyes only, or being able to take another person’s perspective. Recognising more non-fiction authors showed the opposite association.
For the complete post and links to the source material, click here. Who said we'd never put those endless hours of dreamy, solitary reading to good use?
Four times a year we publish our on-line literary journal, r.kv.r.y. quarterly. As the New York Times reminds us today, one of our favorite moods -- optimism "causes a great deal of mischief, leading us to underestimate the time and trouble of the projects we undertake." On the other hand, as Jim Holt notes in You Are What You Expect, The Futures of Optimists and Pessimists,
the mere fact that [optimism] is so widespread in our species suggests it might have some adaptive value. Perhaps if we calculated our odds in a more cleareyed way, we wouldn't be able to get out of bed in the morning.
So it is with our decision, nearly three years ago, to publish an on-line literary magazine. We so underestimate the time and trouble of this purely recreational project that we are unlikely to post anything on this blog in the coming week.
If you're an old Lit major practicing law or conducting business and missing the thrill of a well-turned phrase, check out our archives.
The most noteworthy entries in the Winter 2007 issue (still under construction) are two chapters from local author-attorney Richard Wirick's nearly completed novel, The Devil's Water. I practiced law with Rick at Buchalter, Nemer in the late '80s and early 90's, at which time he held the sigular distinction of being the only person I knew who'd read both Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake. For Literature majors, this is the equivalent of inventing cold fusion.
More recently, Rick has been nominated for the prestigious PENN/Faulkner award for his cycle of prose-poems One Hundred Siberian Postcards, which, we must proudly point out, r.kv.r.y. printed first (well, at least three of them, before Telegram Books in London had the wisdom to publish all one hundred).
So that's where we'll be. Laboring over the Yahoo! SiteBuilder, taking far far far longer than we ever planned to publish the next issue of r.kv.r.y.
I've been reading a lot about creativity lately because it is central to my practice as a mediator and central to the business opportunities of my commercial clients. As Colin Powell says when speaking to business people, "to negotiate a deal, you need to be inside the other guy's decision cycle."
Understanding the creative process in business is one of the ways I try to stay in my clients' "decision cycles."
So why Juggling in a Cone?
Two reasons.
HOPE AND CREATIVE SELF-EXPRESSION
First, it gives me hope for humankind. That we follow the creative call and then spend hundreds (THOUSANDS?) of hours perfecting our heart's desire without realistic chance of material gain makes me believe we WILL find solutions to global warming, tribal and border warfare, poverty and disease. I can't help myself. Juggling in a Cone makes me marvel, makes me laugh, lights up my world.
Second, Juggling in a Cone is all about exploring creativity with severe constraints. There's not a lot of room in that cylinder. Given its limitations, what might a juggler do? Hit the play button and see if you're as enchanted as I am.
TURNING LIMITATIONS INTO SOLUTIONS
In Turning Limitations into Solutions (the February online issue of Business Week) Marissa Ann Mayer, vice-president for search products and user experience at Google, says
Creativity is often misunderstood. People often think of it in terms of artistic work -- unbridled, unguided effort that leads to beautiful effect. If you look deeper, however, you'll find that some of the most inspiring art forms -- haikus, sonatas, religious paintings -- are fraught with constraints. They're beautiful because creativity triumphed over the rules. Constraints shape and focus problems, and provide clear challenges to overcome as well as inspiration. Creativity, in fact, thrives best when constrained.
Yet constraints must be balanced with a healthy disregard for the impossible. Disregarding the bounds of what we know or what we accept gives rise to ideas that are nonobvious, unconventional, or simply unexplored. The creativity realized in this balance between constraint and disregard for the impossible are fueled by passion and result in revolutionary change.
Having recently been turned on to cartoonist and copyrighter Hugh McLeod's Gaping Void comics (care of Geoff Sharp's eagle eye) I find that artists have been hip to the creativity-constraint principle for some time. In McLeod's case, the constraint is the size of a business card.
In mediation practice -- the practice building part -- the constraint is generally expressed as a series of reasons one can't make a living at it -- the pro bono panel distorts the market, I'm not a judge, I'm too young, I did transacitonal work, I came to the market too late, there are too many mediators in Los Angeles, the commercial panels have the market all tied up, etc., etc., etc.
If we use these constraints rather than complain about them, we might find ourselves, well, juggling in a cone.
For excellent advice from an artist about pursuing your heart's desire, go to the extended entry, Advice on Being Creative . I took the time to read this in full yesterday - a highly worthwhile time commitment. I recommend it to anyone searching for a solution to the intractable problem of "what are we to do with our one and only lives?"
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First and most importantly, I suppose, are the
18th Century Dispute Resolution Technology: The (
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ou tend to escape gravity in a fury of creative activity.
The google algorithm throws these random musings on negotiation up to me on a weekly basis because "negotiate" is one of my "google alerts." (have I said god bless google recently?)
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The dispute you're having exists in the world of injustice. 
Negotiation is marketing is sales is negotiation is marketing . . . 
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Having recently been (somewhat justifiably) skewered by the law students taking my ADR Employment Class for bluntly telling them that they couldn't write, I must admit that the following reprint, called to my attention by 
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From 
Henry David Thoreau, 
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