Introduction to the Symposium Issue on Listening to the World: New Ideas for Resolving Identity-Based Conflict

Published in cooperation with the American Bar Association Section of Dispute Resolutio

Perspectives on Decisionmaking from the Blackmun Papers: The Cases on Arbitrability of Statutory Claims

Judges\u27 decisions must rank among the most documented types of decisionmaking. At the appellate level, in particular, the arguments made to judges are a matter of record and the decisions are recorded in written opinions that provide a reasoned explanation. Yet there are many unknowns about this decisionmaking process. This article draws on information found in the Blackmun Papers collection at the Library of Congress to explore Supreme Court decisionmaking as illustrated in the series of cases that opened the door to welcome arbitration of statutory claims. I The cases brought about the weakening and eventual abrogation of a long-standing precedent and the papers shed some light on the incremental steps by which this happened. The Justice\u27s individual explanations for their votes reveal an exercise of discretion based on varying rationales - principles of statutory interpretation, policy leanings, and concern for the practical- effect of the Court\u27s decisions - that are intertwined with the question of the reach and continuing validity of one of the Court\u27s major arbitration precedents

Mediation: Embedded Assumptions of Whiteness?

This article attempts to uncover some of the systemic ways in which white supremacy is expressed in the practice of mediation in the United States with the goal of inspiring additional conversations and deeper attention to these issues by scholars and practitioners in the field of dispute resolution. Our methodology is to apply the themes in Layla F. Saad’s book, Me and White Supremacy: Combat Racism, Change the World, and Become a Good Ancestor (2020). We use the lenses of tone policing, color-blindness, racial stereotyping, anti-blackness, white silence, and white supremacy to reflect on the following aspects of mediation: communication norms, expression of anger, emphasis on the future, the development of narratives, mediator bias, mediator neutrality, embedded assumptions about conflict, who serves as mediators, and the role of self-determination. The article concludes with some suggestions for potential ways to address the issues raised

ADR and Access to Justice: Current Perspectives

Extract: I want to give you a roadmap for our program. We will not be delivering individual papers but, rather, hope to have a discussion. We are planning to spend thirty minutes on introductions for the purpose of allowing you to identify the source of each panelist\u27s perspectives. We will then use an hour, more or less, for a discussion among the panel. That will leave fifteen minutes for audience questions and participation. Because we will be publishing an edited transcript, we ask that you hold your questions until the end. Access to justice is a broad topic, and we cannot cover everything. You will notice a few major omissions. Most notably, we are not going to emphasize consumer pre-dispute arbitration agreements. This is not because they are not important, but because much has been written and said on this topic, and it could easily swallow the whole discussion. Also, we are probably not going to say very much about restorative justice, and I am sure you will notice some other holes. We invite you to raise missing issues in your comments. Let me start with a few opening remarks. We are building upon earlier panels on access to justice at this meeting. At the ones I attended, I have heard two different themes. One is about the availability of lawyers and the value of legal representation, emphasizing that having a lawyer is a key aspect of access to justice. Another theme asks whether the legal system is providing justice aside from the question of adequate representation in individual cases. This critique emphasizes the extent to which the litigation system is stacked, and ways in which laws fail to recognize the individual realities of the disadvantaged. Both these themes are highly relevant to the role of dispute resolution in access to justice

The wide-field, multiplexed, spectroscopic facility WEAVE : survey design, overview, and simulated implementation

Funding for the WEAVE facility has been provided by UKRI STFC, the University of Oxford, NOVA, NWO, Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), the Isaac Newton Group partners (STFC, NWO, and Spain, led by the IAC), INAF, CNRS-INSU, the Observatoire de Paris, Région Île-de-France, CONCYT through INAOE, Konkoly Observatory (CSFK), Max-Planck-Institut für Astronomie (MPIA Heidelberg), Lund University, the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam (AIP), the Swedish Research Council, the European Commission, and the University of Pennsylvania.WEAVE, the new wide-field, massively multiplexed spectroscopic survey facility for the William Herschel Telescope, will see first light in late 2022. WEAVE comprises a new 2-degree field-of-view prime-focus corrector system, a nearly 1000-multiplex fibre positioner, 20 individually deployable 'mini' integral field units (IFUs), and a single large IFU. These fibre systems feed a dual-beam spectrograph covering the wavelength range 366-959 nm at R ∼ 5000, or two shorter ranges at R ∼ 20,000. After summarising the design and implementation of WEAVE and its data systems, we present the organisation, science drivers and design of a five- to seven-year programme of eight individual surveys to: (i) study our Galaxy's origins by completing Gaia's phase-space information, providing metallicities to its limiting magnitude for ∼ 3 million stars and detailed abundances for ∼ 1.5 million brighter field and open-cluster stars; (ii) survey ∼ 0.4 million Galactic-plane OBA stars, young stellar objects and nearby gas to understand the evolution of young stars and their environments; (iii) perform an extensive spectral survey of white dwarfs; (iv) survey  ∼ 400 neutral-hydrogen-selected galaxies with the IFUs; (v) study properties and kinematics of stellar populations and ionised gas in z 1 million spectra of LOFAR-selected radio sources; (viii) trace structures using intergalactic/circumgalactic gas at z > 2. Finally, we describe the WEAVE Operational Rehearsals using the WEAVE Simulator.PostprintPeer reviewe