Since its founding, the Saltman Center for Conflict Resolution at the UNLV William S. Boyd School of Law has gained a global reputation for its impactful contributions within the realm of alternative dispute resolution. Those contributions continued in a big way in 2021, with faculty members advancing the conflict resolution discussion through their scholarship, as well as live and remote presentations around the world.
From critiques of the securities and finance industries to an in-depth look at how psychology and the law are intertwined, Saltman Center professors wrote and talked about a wide range of ADR topics this year. Here is a sample of their work:
Benjamin Edwards, Director of the Public Policy Clinic & Associate Professor of Law, continued to critique U.S. regulation of the securities and finance industries. He placed his most recent article, Supreme Risk, with the Florida Law Review. The article has been discussed in three blogs: Oxford, Columbia, and Duke.
Eve Hanan, Co-Director of the Misdemeanor Clinic & Associate Professor of Law, published Talking Back in Court, 49 Wash. L. Rev. 493 (2021). She also presented this work, which examines how judges and unrepresented defendants essentially negotiate over the terms of potential guilty pleas, at the annual Law and Society Association conference on May 29, 2021.
Thomas Main, William S. Boyd Professor of Law, continued his work with the Max Planck Institute’s Comparative Procedural Law and Justice project. Main also is a member of the team that is writing about the role of mediation in litigation. The project, which involves more than 100 procedural scholars from across the world, will ultimately produce a Compendium on Comparative Civil Justice accessible online and in print as a multi-volume publication. He recently published The Elastics of Snap Removal: An Empirical Case Study of Textualism, 69 Cleve. St. L. Rev. 289 (2021)(with Professors David McClure & Jeffrey Stempel).
Lydia Nussbaum, Director of the Saltman Center and the Mediation Clinic, presented on “Dynamic Pedagogy in the Family and Juvenile Law Classroom: Experiential and In-Class Exercises,” a 2020 AALS Annual Meeting program from the Section on Family & Juvenile Law, co-sponsored by the Sections on Children and the Law, Clinical Legal Education, and Teaching Methods. Nussbaum’s subsequent article, Creating Opportunities to ‘Prepare, Perform, and Reflect’ in a Doctrinal Family Law Course, details methods for integrating negotiation, mediation, and client-counseling skills in a doctrinal course. The article is forthcoming in a special issue of the Family Court Review.
Jeff Stempel, Doris S. & Theodore B. Lee Professor of Law, continues rapporteur work for several sections of the UNIDROIT Principles of Reinsurance Contract Law, which is intended to serve as a model code for resolving reinsurance disputes in arbitration and other forums. Among his most recent publications are General Liability Coverage: Key Issues in Every State (5th ed. 2021)(with Randy J. Maniloff, Esq. and Margo Meta, Esq.); Infected Judgment: Creating Conventional Wisdom and Insurance Coverage Denial in a Pandemic, 27 Conn. Ins. L.J. 185 (2021)(with Erik S. Knutsen); and Hard Battles Over Soft Law: The Troubling Implications of Insurance Industry Attacks on the American Law Institute Restatement of the Law of Liability Insurance, 69 Cleve. St. L. Rev. 606 (2021). Stempel also continues to serve as an organizer and presenter in the series of Transnational Lectures on Insurance Law, sponsored by the European Law Institute’s Insurance Law section. He recently gave remote presentations in Madrid and Zurich, as well as a live presentation in Chicago.
Jean Sternlight, Michael and Sonja Saltman Professor of Law & Founding Director of the Saltman Center, published Psychology for Lawyers: Understanding the Human Factors in Negotiation, Litigation, and Decision Making. (ABA Publications, 2021, 2d ed.) (with Jennifer K. Robbennolt). Also, one of her previous articles, Panacea or Corporate Tool: The Aftermath, is featured in the new book Discussions in Dispute Resolution: The Formative Articles (Hinshaw, Schneider, and Cole, eds.,) (Oxford Univ. Press 2021). Sternlight’s latest article, High-Tech Dispute Resolution: Lessons from Psychology for a Post-Covid-19 Era (with Jennifer Robbennolt) was part of the Clifford Symposium and will be published in the DePaul Law Review. She has given presentations in 2021 to audiences in London, Fiji, Australia, Houston, and Connecticut.
