Mediation & Negotiation

The following Q&A featuring Harvard Law School Professor Robert Mnookin ’68 was featured in the July 24, 2009, edition of the Boston Globe.

The winners of Harvard Law School’s 56th annual Williston Contracts Competition were announced on April 28. The competition, sponsored by the Board of Student Advisers and organized and run by Harvard Negotiators, offers first-year students the opportunity to practice negotiation and contract drafting.

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.

For 35 years, Washington, D.C. attorney Robert B. Barnett has been one of the nation’s most sought-after lawyers, representing major corporations including McDonald’s, General Electric, and Comcast.

Four HLS students in the Negotiation and Mediation Clinical Program have just finished an ambitious, semester-long project with Kenneth R. Feinberg, Special Master of the 9/11 Fund and a leading expert in alternative dispute resolution, to help staunch the widespread mortgage foreclosure crisis by bringing banks and homeowners together to refashion mortgage agreements.

As a teenager growing up in a suburb of Chicago, Susan D. Page ’89 already knew she wanted to live overseas: “I think it was an early reflection of my feelings about the U.S. and how I fit in. I have never felt like it’s really been home.”

At first, the notion that Israel could sit down with its sworn enemies and achieve a limited agreement to protect civilians seemed far-fetched to Gabriella Blum LL.M. ’01 S.J.D. ’03. The year was 1997, Blum was a young officer in the Israel Defense Forces, and she’d just been assigned to a group with the task of monitoring that noble, if dubious, effort.

Christo and Jeanne-Claude—the artists whose notable projects include “The Gates” in New York City’s Central Park—received the Great Negotiator Award from HLS’s Program on Negotiation.

On May 16th, two HLS students, René A. Pfromm LL.M. '08 and Ines Wu '09, together with Stephan Sonnenberg '06, Harvard Negotiation and Mediation Program (HNMCP) clinical fellow and lecturer on law, delivered a one day workshop on negotiation in the context of genocide and mass atrocities.

When Becca O’Brien ’05 and Ommeed Sathe ’06 returned to HLS last October to talk about building partnerships in post-Katrina New Orleans, they gave a painstaking account of what should, but doesn’t, work.

Last weekend, a team of students representing Harvard Law School took first place in The Negotiation Challenge in Leipzig, Germany. This year's Harvard Negotiators team was represented by Rene A. Pfromm LL.M. '08, Stefan Neata '08 and Jessica Price '08. Their win marks the second year in a row HLS has won the competition.

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.

Susan Lytle Lipton LL.M. '71 practiced securities law and was the first woman to become a partner at Greenberg, Traurig, Hoffman, Lipoff & Quentel in Florida.

Peter Carfagna '79 has negotiated for Tiger Woods and other marquee athletes. As sports law has become increasingly diversified, so has he. He now owns two baseball teams.

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

When I first began to work with Frank Sander ’52 as a 3L at Harvard Law School in 1997, I realized that when it came to finding a mentor in alternative dispute resolution, I had struck gold.

When Melissa Patterson ’06 signed up for a clinical placement through the school’s new Child Advocacy Program this year, she was looking for something as “real-world” as possible.

Some of the biggest deal makers put the world on hold while they teach in a class led by Professor Guhan Subramanian '98. But they're also there to learn a thing or two about negotiation.

Harvard-trained negotiators are working hard on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, in which everyone seems to know where they want to go but no one knows quite how to get there.

Frank E.A. Sander '52 had nearly two decades under his belt teaching tax and family law at HLS when Chief Justice Warren Burger tapped him to present a paper on alternative dispute resolution 29 years ago.

For decades, negotiators have struggled to "separate the people from the problem," one of the cardinal rules set forth in the seminal book "Getting to Yes." But what if the people are the problem--or at least appear to be?