So You Think You Can Bring Peace to the Middle East?

I’ve never used a computer game in my teaching, but Andrea Schneider and Kathleen Goodrich ‘o8 make a good case that the game PeaceMaker has a lot to teach dispute resolution students.  The game puts players into the position of either the Israeli Prime Minister or the Palestinian President, with an opportunity to achieve peace and win a Nobel Prize or fail and lose office.  Andrea and Kathleen describe how the game can be used to teach principles of dispute resolution in a new paper entitled “The Classroom Can Be All Fun & Games.”  Their paper, which is available on SSRN here, was recently published at 25 Ohio St. J. on Disp. Resol. 87.  The abstract appears after the jump.  Do readers have any other suggestions for computer games that can be usefully incorporated into law-school teaching?

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Down to Earth Advice from a Lofty Diplomatic Perch

Being an American ambassador can be a pretty surreal experience, but it can lead to some real advice for people considering careers in international business law.

Rick Graber, a prominent Milwaukee lawyer and Republican leader, was ambassador to the Czech Republic for the last two and a half years of President George W. Bush’s administration. He described his experiences as ambassador and gave advice during a recent hour with about 25 students in Profossor Irene Calboli’s International Business Transactions course at the Law School.

Graber called the lifestyle of an ambassador unimaginable – a spectacular 60,000-square-foot house and eight to ten people to run the house. “You’d take your shirt off in the evening and, magically, it would be clean in the morning,” he said. “That doesn’t happen much in Shorewood.”

Graber described the two major issues that occupied him during his time in the Czech Republic.

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International Media and Conflict Resolution

Photojournalists_bwI’ve just received my new copy of the Marquette Law Review, which includes a fascinating collection of papers on the role of the media in international conflict resolution.  This symposium issue emerged from the Law School’s conference on this topic last spring, which was organized by Professors Andrea Schneider and Natalie Fleury.  In her introductory essay to the symposium, Andrea explains the genesis of the conference this way:

For conflict resolution scholars, the idea of focusing on the media is a logical one. After all, the media is the primary method through which the public and political leadership perceive and understand conflicts at home and abroad. If we are working to better handle these conflicts, the way that these conflicts are explained and understood is a crucial part of that process. Do the media have a responsibility to report all sides, even if one side is “wrong”? Do the media share in responsibility for escalation of a conflict if the reporting is incendiary? (The conviction of certain media figures involved in the Rwandan genocide and the use of “Tokyo Rose” during World War II are only two stark examples of how media can be directly involved in conflict.) And what of the responsibility of conflict specialists — are those of us in the conflict resolution field ignoring the media at our peril?

The symposium issue includes not only general, theoretical articles, but also case studies of specific conflicts from Iraq to Tibet to Peru.  All of the articles can be downloaded from the Law Review’s website, as can video from the conference.  The full list of articles and authors is after the jump.  Congratulations to the editors of Volume 93 for a great first issue! 

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