Four Ways of Looking at a Lawsuit: How Lawyers Can Use the Cognitive Frameworks of Mediation

Lawyers who represent their clients in mediation may often find themselves at odds with their mediators. The mediators may be trying to create new value for the parties, beyond a simple compromise of their legalistic claims and defenses. They may be seeking to repair or improve the parties\u27 relationship, or they may wish to lead the parties to greater mutual understanding. Lawyers, on the other hand, are more likely to engage in adversarial, legalistic bargaining, looking only to gain the most, or to give up the least, through a process of compromise. As a result, the mediators\u27 approaches clash with those of the lawyers. The tensions are more deeply rooted than a simple difference in goals, tactics, or techniques; they arise from the different cognitive frameworks about the nature of conflict and the ways to deal with it that mediators and lawyers bring to their meeting. These cognitive frameworks, often operating tacitly and without an actor\u27s conscious awareness, create different and competing perceptions among mediators and lawyers about what is relevant for the process and what is appropriate for them to do. The mediation literature has articulated four different, if overlapping, cognitive frameworks for dealing with conflict in a mediation setting: distributive compromise, creating more value for all, changing relationships, and increasing the mutual understanding of the parties in conflict. Mediators may move through all four, though they might tend to identify themselves with one in particular. Lawyers, however, tend to be limited to the first: distributive compromise. Understanding the cognitive frameworks shows how lawyers can operate congruently with mediators, rather than in opposition to them. The cognitive frameworks are versions of ways that people—lawyers included—ordinarily have available to deal with conflict. There is nothing inherent in “legal thinking” that prevents lawyers from shifting into non-adversarial frameworks in mediation. However, it is not easy to shift from one cognitive framework to another simply by wishing to do so. The different frameworks are characterized by different topics of conversation. Whether one talks about what happened in the past, what will happen in the future, the legal or moral meaning of the event, the parties\u27 feelings or their relationship, or how they intend to move into the future, the topic will suggest which particular cognitive framework is in use, and may influence the other participants to engage in the same framework

What Happens When Mediation is Institutionalized?: To the Parties, Practitioners, and Host Institutions

The Alternative Dispute Resolution Section of the Association of American Law Schools presented a program, at the 1994 AALS Conference, on the institutionalization of mediation – through courtconnected programs and otherwise. The topic is an important one, because this phenomenon has become increasingly common in recent years. Moreover, the topic seemed especially appropriate for the 1994 program, since Florida – the host state for the conference – was one of the first states to adopt a comprehensive statute providing for court-ordered mediation (at the trial judge\u27s option) in civil disputes of all kinds. The move toward institutionalizing mediation has raised many questions, and this program was designed to highlight those questions, and provoke this discussion about them. The panel for the program was composed of mediation scholars, teachers and practitioners, from eight diverse jurisdictions around the country, with expertise on many different aspects of the institutionalization issue. The program was organized by Professor Baruch Bush (Program Chair), together with Professor Carol Liebman (Section Chair) and Dean James Alfini (Panel Moderator). This article presents an edited transcript of the panelists\u27 comments

Quantitative theory for the diffusive dynamics of liquid condensates

Key processes of biological condensates are diffusion and material exchange with their environment. Experimentally, diffusive dynamics are typically probed via fluorescent labels. However, to date, a physics-based, quantitative framework for the dynamics of labeled condensate components is lacking. Here, we derive the corresponding dynamic equations, building on the physics of phase separation, and quantitatively validate the related framework via experiments. We show that by using our framework, we can precisely determine diffusion coefficients inside liquid condensates via a spatio-temporal analysis of fluorescence recovery after photobleaching (FRAP) experiments. We showcase the accuracy and precision of our approach by considering space- and time-resolved data of protein condensates and two different polyelectrolyte-coacervate systems. Interestingly, our theory can also be used to determine a relationship between the diffusion coefficient in the dilute phase and the partition coefficient, without relying on fluorescence measurements in the dilute phase. This enables us to investigate the effect of salt addition on partitioning and bypasses recently described quenching artifacts in the dense phase. Our approach opens new avenues for theoretically describing molecule dynamics in condensates, measuring concentrations based on the dynamics of fluorescence intensities, and quantifying rates of biochemical reactions in liquid condensates

What Happens When Mediation is Institutionalized?: To the Parties, Practitioners, and Host Institutions

The Alternative Dispute Resolution Section of the Association of American Law Schools presented a program, at the 1994 AALS Conference, on the institutionalization of mediation – through courtconnected programs and otherwise. The topic is an important one, because this phenomenon has become increasingly common in recent years. Moreover, the topic seemed especially appropriate for the 1994 program, since Florida – the host state for the conference – was one of the first states to adopt a comprehensive statute providing for court-ordered mediation (at the trial judge\u27s option) in civil disputes of all kinds. The move toward institutionalizing mediation has raised many questions, and this program was designed to highlight those questions, and provoke this discussion about them. The panel for the program was composed of mediation scholars, teachers and practitioners, from eight diverse jurisdictions around the country, with expertise on many different aspects of the institutionalization issue. The program was organized by Professor Baruch Bush (Program Chair), together with Professor Carol Liebman (Section Chair) and Dean James Alfini (Panel Moderator). This article presents an edited transcript of the panelists\u27 comments