eMediation–Marquette Students Rock

MediationIn a new competition hosted by Cornell University this past fall, students tested out their skills at dispute resolution over the internet. We finally received the results in December so my apologies for the delay in singing our praises.

Students could choose to play the role of the plaintiff, defendant or mediator in a mediation that was completely conducted via email. Judges then graded their performance using the transcript of the mediation. I encouraged students to participate as part of the ADR class and was delighted with the results. While we all learned more than we wanted to about technical glitches, I hope the experience was educational as well. And, impressively, Marquette students dominated the competition.

As mediators, we placed 1st (Jill Aufmuth) 4th (Jillian Dickson-Igl) and tied for 5th (TJ Wendel). As defendants, we placed 1st (Tea Norfolk), 3rd (Alexander Golubiewski), 4th (Heather Hough) and 5th (Marcus Hirsch). And, as plaintiffs, we tied for 1st (Ryan Session and Dillon Raunio), placed 2nd (Casey Shorts and Frederick Hostetler), 3rd (Kelsey Burazin and Kyle Silver), 4th (Paul Gunderson and Ryan Ybarra), and 5th (Adam Gilmore and Antwayne Robinson). Another way to measure how well we did is that out of the 17 teams that placed, 12 of those teams were from Marquette. A very impressive record!

My congratulations to all the students that placed and appreciation to all those ADR students who participated. Well done.

 

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The Drafting History of the Treaty of Shimonoseki

One of the many contested issues in the sovereignty dispute over the Senkaku / Diaoyu Islands is whether China ceded title to Japan in the Treaty of Shimonoseki. In this post, I’ll briefly explain the competing textual arguments under the Treaty and then explore the question of meaning from an angle that is often overlooked: whether a first-hand, historical account of the Treaty negotiations from a Japanese official named Munemitsu Mutsu favors the contemporary position of either party. Mutsu’s account is valuable to the ongoing debate because he wrote it shortly after the negotiations concluded and, as the Japanese foreign minister and Tokyo’s chief representative at Shimonoseki, he possessed intimate and unsurpassed knowledge of the discussions that occurred. I obtained the account from Kenkenroku: A Diplomatic Record of the Sino-Japanese War, 1894-95, which was edited and translated by Gordon Mark Berger in 1982.

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How and Why: Deepening Your Legal Reasoning

How and WhyOne of my favorite law review articles to assign to first-year law students is Kristen K. Robbins-Tiscione’s Paradigm Lost: Recapturing Classical Rhetoric to Validate Legal Reasoning, 27 Vt. L. Rev. 483 (2002). The article walks a reader through the legal paradigm and discusses how to effectively use deductive reasoning and reasoning by analogy to create a valid and persuasive argument. One of the takeaways from this article is that an advocate should include the facts, holding, and reasoning of a case precedent being used to explain a legal rule. “Facts, holding, and reasoning” becomes somewhat of a mantra in my first-year legal writing courses.

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