Robert Bordone

This year, Clinical Professor Robert Bordone ‘97, director of the Harvard Negotiation and Mediation Clinical Program (HNMCP), developed a capstone consulting project with Major League Baseball (MLB) for his course “Advanced Negotiation: Multiparty Negotiation, Group Decision Making, and Teams,” co-taught with Lecturer on Law Rory Van Loo ’07. MLB tasked the class with providing strategic advice for an upcoming negotiation aimed at the implementation of an international amateur draft. Six teams of Harvard Law School students participated in the semester-long project, competing for the opportunity to present their findings to the MLB. In his essay, “Note from the Big Leagues”, Chris Davis '14, a member of the wining team, reflects on his experience.

Professor Robert Mnookin ’68, chairman of the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School, was honored by the International Academy of Mediators with a lifetime achievement award. The IAM Award is presented to a person who has made exceptional contributions throughout his or her career by personally advancing alternative dispute resolution and inspiring others to do so.

On Oct. 3, former United States Trade Representative Charlene Barshefsky came to Harvard Law School to share her experiences with students in the Advanced Negotiation Workshop taught by Clinical Professor Robert Bordone ’97 and Lecturer Rory Van Loo ’07.

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.”

Last year, after Rory Van Loo ’07 left the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau implementation team to become assistant director of the Harvard Negotiation & Mediation Clinical Program, he asked his former colleagues how HLS students might assist the new agency. It had been created by Congress in 2010 largely thanks to the vision of HLS Professor Elizabeth Warren, and its mission included examining certain consumer financial services companies and large banks and credit unions. But the legislation creating it did not establish an appeals process for examining findings.

In a replica of a high-level White House negotiation session, teams of students in a new advanced negotiation workshop at Harvard Law School offered advice on how to handle Guantanamo detainees. Although the negotiation wasn’t real, for the students the stakes were still high: One team was later selected by fellow students to travel to Washington, D.C., to make a presentation on Guantanamo to U.S. Assistant Attorney General Ronald Weich.

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

The Conflict Prevention and Resolution Institute (CPR) selected the Harvard Negotiation and Mediation Clinical Program (HNMCP) to be the recipient of its 2010 Problem Solving in the Law School Curriculum Award at its annual awards banquet on January 11, 2011.

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.

“Late Justice is not Justice, but manifest injustice,” wrote Ruy Barbosa de Oliveira (1849-1923), perhaps the most prominent jurist and statesman in the history of Brazil. I was struck by these words during my first year of law school in São Paulo.

Sports agent Ronald M. Shapiro ’67 has a dream roster of clients that includes more baseball Hall of Famers than any other agent, including Cal Ripken Jr., Brooks Robinson, Eddie Murray, Kirby Puckett, and such future Hall of Fame probables as 2009 American League MVP Joey Mauer, for whom Shapiro recently negotiated a $184 million contract with the Minnesota Twins.

Negotiations between the White House and Congressional leaders of both parties have been undermined by mistakes that could have been avoided by using a better negotiation process, says Robert Bordone, Clinical Professor of Law and Director of the Harvard Negotiation and Mediation Clinical Program at Harvard Law School.

Most lawyers, irrespective of their specialty, must negotiate. Litigators resolve far more disputes through negotiation than by trials. Business lawyers — whether putting together a…

Robert Bordone ’97, formerly the Thaddeus R. Beal Assistant Clinical Professor of Law, has been named a full clinical professor of law. An expert in negotiation and dispute resolution, Bordone is the founding director of the Harvard Law School Negotiation and Mediation Clinical Program.

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.

The following op-ed, Slow healing in the Catholic Church, co-written by Harvard Law School Professor Robert Bordone '97 and Reverend Robert J. Bowers, was published in the Boston Globe on January 1, 2007.

What [Iranian President Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad’s conference [of Holocaust deniers] proclaims is that truth has no place in the world of politics; that if your ends are just, you can say anything, no matter how far-fetched.

In Nepal, lawyers helped restore the rule of law. But not without paying a price.

In "Preemption: A Knife That Cuts Both Ways" (W. W. Norton, 2006), Professor Alan M. Dershowitz examines America's increasing reliance on pre-emptive action to control destructive conduct, and discusses the implications for civil liberties, human rights, criminal justice, national security and foreign policy.