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

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.

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Whatever Happened to the Underclass?

Those of us whose political memories extend back before the Clinton Administration — and I am still in denial that this is not true for many of my students — may recall a time when the plight of the urban poor seemed a major preoccupation of mainstream journalists and politicians.  I suppose there were even some echoes of this concern as recently as the “No Child Left Behind” phase of the second Bush presidency.  On the whole, though, it has seemed to me that the urban poor have received steadily decreasing attention in our political culture for many years.

Now I get some confirmation and explanation of these impressions in a new paper by David Papke, “The Rise and Fall of the ‘Underclass’: An Exploration of Ideology and the Legal Arena.”  David is particularly interested in the notion of the “underclass,” a common term two decades ago that has since fallen out of use.  Had it retained a more robust place in our political discourse, David suggests that this sort of class conceptualization might have contributed to the political mobilization of the urban poor.  In his view, the displacement of the “underclass” in our national consciousness reflects “a resurgence of the dominant ideology’s traditional emphasis on the individual” (28) — a resurgence that served the interests of the socially powerful by drowning out the social criticism associated with the development of the underclass as an ideological construct.

David’s paper thus provides an interesting counterpoint to a recent paper by Matt Parlow that I blogged about here.  

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Encouraging the Working Poor to Save for Retirement

Are you saving enough for retirement?  It can be a struggle even for those of us who do not live paycheck to paycheck.  For the working poor, the challenge must seem truly daunting.  Yet, Social Security payouts average only a little more than the poverty line, and benefits seem far more likely to decline than to increase in the future.  For those on the margins of poverty, putting money aside today may be critical to avoid a financial crisis in old age.

Should government step in to promote retirement savings by the working poor?  Vada Lindsey thinks so.  In a new paper on SSRN, she proposes reforms to the earned income tax credit that would push recipients to put a portion of their tax refunds into retirement savings.

Vada’s proposal has many intricacies, but the core features include an automatic allocation of ten percent of EITC benefits to a retirement plan, IRA, or other investment vehicle, plus a matching contribution from the government for additional savings beyond the automatic ten percent.  EITC recipients could opt out, but the default position would be in favor of savings. 

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