The Red Velvet Lawyer

Recent research again examined the mental health, happiness, and well-being of law students.   The news is not good, but we've known that for many years.  Research conducted in 2012, in Australia, examined whether a relationship might exists between emotional intelligence (EI) and better psychological health among law students.  Prior research had reported high rates of depression among law students.  "They experience a significant deterioration in their mental health status during law school  . . . . [that] may begin in the first year of study."   The research, using self-assessment tools of three types, indicated that students with higher EI were: Less likely to suffer psychiatric symptoms,  Less likely to use alcohol, More likely to be satisfied with life. The so-called " "Big Five"  personality factors of agreeableness, conscientiousness, extroversion, and neuroticism had a stronger link to psychological heal...

A decade after his first “grid” article, described in my last posting  here , Professor Len Riskin looked again at the question of mediator style, orientation, or strategies.  Perhaps influenced by his 20-year experience in mediation, or by his understanding of “living in the moment” derived from his mindfulness meditation practice, or perhaps because of the increasingly shriller debate about which style was “best,”   he took a more nuanced and fresh look at the original grid.   See  Leonard Riskin,  Who Decides What? Rethinking the Grid of Mediator Orientations , 9 No.2 Disp. Resol. J. 22 (2003).     He now suggests, I think, that we mediators should be gentler with each other.  Instead of labeling ourselves and each other (bad, bad evaluator or flakey, inefficient facilitator, or weird transformative mediator), mediators can ask instead what the parties need in the moment.  Mediators can also listen better when the p...

In 1994, Len Riskin, then the C.A. Leedy Professor of Law at the University of Missouri-Columbia and Director of its Center for the Study of Dispute Resolution, inadvertently started a great debate about what “style” of mediation was “best.”   When he published the article entitled, Mediator Orientations, Strategies and Techniques , 12 Alternatives to the High Cost of Litigation 111 (1994), he described four styles of mediation based on how broadly the mediator defined the problem presented by the parties (and thus the depth of intervention the mediator was likely to take) and the role of the mediator -- either facilitative or evaluative.   According to this analytical scheme, a mediator could be: narrow/facilitative, narrow/evaluative, broad/facilitative or broad/evaluative.   The two-dimensional grid based on this analysis supposedly predicts the strategies each type of mediator is likely to use, and, Riskin thought at the time, the amount of self-determination the...