Legal Education – Page 59 – Marquette University Law School Faculty Blog

Mediation Tournament a Great Learning Experience

Post author:Joelle Jasper
Post published:February 17, 2011
Post category:Legal Education Marquette Law School Mediation

Two weeks ago I had to opportunity to compete in a mediation tournament. This tournament involved three rounds where each student rotated from round to round playing an attorney, a client, and a mediator. Being a participant and working with my fellow teammates has increased my understanding and skills as an attorney and a mediator. In preparation for the tournament each of the competitors underwent a training session on effective mediation. Not only were we there to represent our schools in competition, but the session before the tournament provided us with an additional teaching element.

Round One: Attorney in a landlord-tenant action My client was involved in eviction proceedings against an intimidating ex-hockey player who refused to pay rent.

“If I’d Wanted to Teach About Feelings, I Wouldn’t Have Become a Law Professor”

Post author:Michael M. O'Hear
Post published:January 17, 2011
Post category:Legal Education Legal Scholarship Negotiation

That’s the intriguing title of a new paper by Andrea Schneider, Melissa Nelken, and Jamil Nahaud. The title expresses the authors’ mock horror at the thought of “bringing feelings into the room when teaching negotiation.” They recognize that legal education is not exactly known for helping students to get in touch with their feelings: “learning ‘to think like a lawyer’ has traditionally favored cognition and ignored the powerful role of emotions in all human undertakings.” Yet, they are convinced that law students will benefit from studying emotions:

One of the goals of focusing on feelings in a negotiation class is to help students learn that they can be emotionally engaged with clients and, therefore, with their own work as lawyers without becoming identified with them. Lawyers who understand clients at an emotional level are better able to represent the client’s needs. And a lawyer who is sensitive to the emotional cues of his counterparts in a negotiation is better able to navigate the tricky waters of dispute resolution in a way that satisfies his client’s needs without riding roughshod over the other parties involved.

After laying out the benefits of covering emotions in a negotiation class, the authors then provide several practical examples of how negotiation teachers can effectively incorporate a study of feelings into the classroom experience.

This paper is just one of three new papers by Andrea on various aspects of teaching negotiation, all of which appear as chapters in Venturing Beyond the Classroom (Honeyman et al., eds. 2010). The abstracts and links for the other two appear after the jump.

Finding Your Own Path

Post author:Lisa A. Mazzie
Post published:January 13, 2011
Post category:Legal Education Legal Practice

Life sometimes turns out not at all as we planned. And that can be a very good thing.

Take my life, for example. As an undergraduate, I had it all planned: I was going to be a career woman in corporate public relations or a professional writer, living in a large city — Chicago, perhaps — unencumbered by family demands because I decided I did not want children. Fast forward a couple of decades and here I sit, in the living room of my home in suburban Madison, Wisconsin, a mother of two sons, a lawyer, and a law professor.

How and when did that master plan change? As I think it must be for most people, there wasn’t necessarily one grand event that put me on a different path. Instead, it was little choices I made along the way, little, but, as it turned out, significant choices, such that one day I woke up and realized I was in a place that vastly differed from where I thought I’d be. When I think of it, I am always reminded of something author Marion Winik said in her book Rules for the Unruly: Living an Unconventional Life: “The path is not straight.”