Harvard Negotiation and Mediation Clinical Program

More than 100 years after students started the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau, there are now 40 clinics and Student Practice Organizations at HLS, focused on everything from cyberlaw to veterans’ rights.

In becoming a Marine and then a lawyer, Nathan Garrett Jester ’20 is interested in someday going into local or state politics in his home state of Georgia, to serve the community where he was born and raised.

In November, the Harvard Negotiation and Mediation Clinical Program celebrated its 10th anniversary, marking its evolution into a robust program of global clinical work in dispute systems design, innovative pedagogy around teamwork, and expanded course offerings in multiparty negotiation, group decision-making, teams and facilitation.

Harvard Law School is pleased to announce that a $1 million gift from Ada Tse ’91 and James Yang through their family’s YangTse Foundation will expand and enhance the Law School’s signature Negotiation Workshop, an intensive course that combines theory and practice to improve students’ understanding of negotiation and their effectiveness as negotiators.

Former Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis ’60, who was the Democratic nominee for president in 1988 and is now a professor of political science at Northeastern University, visited a session of Harvard Law School’s Negotiation Workshop in late April to lead discussion of a case study and answer student questions.

Graduating HLS students help build a new court mediation program to meet demand for protection from harassment.

It is the spring of 1997 and I am sitting in Pound 107 while Roger Fisher ’48, Williston Professor of Law, Emeritus, is telling a story about his serving as a weather reconnaissance pilot in World War II. As a teaching assistant for the Negotiation Workshop, I have heard the story at least a dozen times by now and feel my mind wandering. And yet, against my will, as the story reaches its crescendo and the combination punch line/negotiation lesson flows from Roger’s lips, I find myself involuntarily leaning forward and, a second later, helplessly bursting into laughter. The note I jot down to myself is: “All of life is about who tells better stories.”

The winners of Harvard Law School’s 59th annual Williston Competition, Harvard’s annual contract negotiation and drafting competition for first-year law students, were announced on April 19.

“I took the view that what we ought to be talking about and thinking about was universal suffrage,” stated Michael Young in a lecture at Harvard Law School titled, “The Secret Talks That Led to the Fall of Apartheid.”  As a British businessman in the 1980s, Young initiated and led unprecedented talks between the African National Congress and the South African government that led to the end of apartheid in South Africa.

This past January, three students from Harvard Law School’s Negotiation and Mediation Clinical Program traveled to Chile to investigate the Ministry of Justice’s neighborhood multi-door courthouse pilot program.

HLS clinic helps teens who have been victimized by acts of violence.

This year, the Harvard Mediation Program (HMP) (a Student Practice Organization) celebrates its 30th anniversary of training students and community volunteers to mediate disputes in small claims court and other settings.

The winners of Harvard Law School’s 58th annual Williston Competition, Harvard’s annual contract negotiation and drafting competition for first-year law students, were announced on April 18. 

Sixteen teams from nine different law schools from throughout the Northeast took part in the ABA Regional Negotiation Competition held at Harvard Law School and organized by Harvard Negotiators on November 13–14, 2010. Approximately 35 judges, all practicing lawyers in the Boston area, evaluated the teams and chose the winners.

Twenty senior federal officials – both Republicans and Democrats – met in Washington in July to hone their negotiation and consensus building skills with members of the Harvard Negotiation and Mediation Clinical Program (HNMCP) at Harvard Law School.

There are now 16 clinics at HLS, enabling students to do fieldwork at home and abroad. Here are stories from three of them, taking students inside inner cities and inner sanctums.