Negotiation Advice from an International Arbitrator

Last week, I was delighted to welcome Lucy Reed, a partner at Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer and co-chair of their international arbitration group as our inaugural speaker for our speakers series on Gender & Negotiation, funded by the University Centennial Celebration Fund to celebrate 100 years of women at Marquette.  Lucy has an amazing background in both the private and public sector.  She has served as a Commissioner of the Ethiopia-Eritrea Claims Commission and co-director of the Claims Resolution Tribunal for Dormant Accounts in Switzerland.  She was the U.S. Agent to the Iran-U.S. Claims Tribunal and also general counsel of the Korean Pennisula Energy Development Organization (the organization negotiating with North Korea over its nuclear plants.)  Her private sector work currently focuses on investment treaty arbitrations and other public international law disputes. 

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Best of the Blogs Part II: Drugs, Immigration, and the Hotel “Death Ray”

If that title doesn’t increase readership of my posts, I don’t know what will.

My contribution this week to our “best of the blogs” feature (which I have taken license to interpret as “best of the blogs and other news read online…”) is even more random than usual.

First, the drug-related story that caught my eye in the relatively recent past.  The Daily Beast Cheat Sheet reported on September 27th about a Cato Institute study showing that since Portugal decriminalized drug possession in 2001, drug use among adolescents has fallen, HIV infection rates fell, and addicts have increasingly sought help to overcome their addictions.  The full story was in Time, here. An excerpt:

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More on An Ethic of Professional Satisfaction

I rather liked Rebecca Blemberg’s post on lawyer happiness and virtue ethics and would like to extend the discussion. I agree that one of the mistakes a lawyer can make is to follow the lure of a consequentialism that is divorced from her knowledge of herself and what that tells her about the way in which she should practice law.

We normally associate this with pursuit of the shimmering rewards of legal practice such as money or glory. Rebecca is right to suggest that these things, in and of themselves, will not make for a happy career. I know plenty of lawyers who love the practice while making tons of money and winning lots of cases, but their happiness as lawyers (and perhaps their success) has another source.

But it seems to me that one can become unhappy in the law by pursuing what might be seen as selfless objectives as well. Thus the picture of Al Pacino as Milton in The Devil’s Advocate.

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