An Appreciation of Marc Galanter’s Scholarship

Lande highlights three of Marc Galanter\u27s works to illustrate qualities that seem especially worth emulating. He includes extended excerpts of his writing because his concepts and language are so evoctive that paraphrasing often does not do them justice. Galanter\u27s works that Lande focuses, include the classic articles, Why the Haves Come Out Ahead: Speculations on the Limits of Legal Change ; and Case Congregations and Their Careers . The professor\u27s recent book, Lowering the Bar: Lawyer Jokes and Legal Culture, is also featured. The book is the culmination of much of his work on American law

Whose Dispute Is It Anyway? A Philosophical and Democratic Defense of Settlement (In Some Cases)

I have often thought myself ill-suited to my chosen profession. I love to argue, but I am often too quick to say both, yes, I see your point and concede something to the other side, and to say of my own arguments, yes, but, it\u27s not that simple. In short, I have trouble with polarized argument, debate, and the adversarialism that characterizes much of our work. Where others see black and white, I often see not just the grey but the purple and red-in short, the complexity of human issues that appear before the law for resolution. In the last decade or so, a polarized debate about how disputes should be resolved has demonstrated to me once again the difficulties of simplistic and adversarial arguments

When experts educate, what do their metaphors say? Complex metaphor structure in the professional conflict resolution literature

This metaphoric analysis of a quarter-million word corpus of an expert literature (conflict resolution and professional mediation) suggests certain implicit assumptions of the experts and gives us an alternate view of the structure of their thinking. Seven highly conventional metaphors are repeatedly used to frame descriptions and explanations, making a complex subject matter more accessible to learners. They have been reported widely in other literatures and genres and are not particular to the field of expertise covered. These metaphors were found in some instances to oversimplify and mislead, mitigated to a degree when combinations of metaphors reconstituted some of the necessary complexity. The seven principal metaphor source domains found are containers, objects, terrain, seeing/viewing, moving, journeying, and structuring. Evidence of frequent and diverse mappings argues that these are conceptual metaphors, revealing possible thinking patterns. The combining and alternating of metaphors in mutually complementary ways shows an interdependence among the seven metaphors. These naturally occurring conceptual groupings clarify and elaborate meaning in the texts in a way comparable to inheritance hierarchies. The discussion of the results focuses on ways these metaphors both help and hinder understanding of the field in question

Developing a New Approach to Managing and Mediating Conflicts

Generally speaking, words can be elusive and they need to be carefully selected when conveying messages, ideas and proposals between parties. This is all the more evident in mediation process as language has to be neutral and mediators should avoid expressions directing parties. In this regard, recent theoretical developments in postmodern social theory and the social constructionist movement in the social sciences and humanities have provided the field of alternative dispute resolution with a new approach to managing and mediating conflicts. These developments are organized around the ‘narrative approach’ which helps us to see how the language we use to describe and understand our conflicts are is operative in constructing an image in our minds of the conflict itself. The research conducted in this paper is in line with the theoretical principles behind the narrative mediation. By reframing the discourses surrounding the conflict situation, the analysis demonstrates that mediators might become aware of the peculiarities of mediation discourse and might be able to adapt the process to meet the particular circumstances in a knowledgeable way

Citizenship Education or Crowd Control? The Crick Report and the Role of Peace Education and Conflict Resolution in the New Citizenship Curriculum

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"Facts" and "Feelings" in the Discursive Construction of the "Best Interests of a Child": The Charlie Gard Case

The study investigates how the ethical issues of the "best interests" of a child, end-of-life care and parental responsibility were presented and discursively constructed in the case of Charlie Gard, a young baby suffering from a rare degenerative disease with no known cure. The story of his parents' legal battle against doctors' decisions to withdraw treatment hit the headlines, arousing strong, emotional reactions among the public. The paper investigates the linguistic resources adopted in the presentation of the various arguments of the parties involved. The corpus is therefore made up of two subcorpora, one covering the institutional, specialist discourse of the hospitals and law courts, the other composed of articles published in British quality and popular newspapers. Bearing in mind the heterogeneous nature of the sources, the study primarily adopts a qualitative discourse analysis approach, and in particular Appraisal Theory which offers a wide and flexible range of instruments to find the key to the reading of a text