The antecedents which have convinced us of this are many, but four in particular stand out:
a) For the past four years, six leading schools have worked together on a project titled "Developing transnational curricula in negotiation, mediation, arbitration and dispute systems design". This project, jointly-funded by the US Government’s Department of Education and its European Commission equivalent, has involved three US law schools that are perceived as leaders in dispute resolution (Hamline University Law School, Cardozo Law School, and Ohio State) and three European counterparts (the University of Rome “La Sapienza”, the University of Deusto in Bilbao, Spain, and the Institut Catholique de Paris) in an effort to improve consistency and mutual understanding of how these subjects might be taught across Europe and the United States. Negotiation has been a particular focus. Giuseppe De Palo and Jim Coben organized the European and US sides of this joint project respectively, and Chris Honeyman has served as the project’s evaluator.
b) Also since 2003, there has been a major effort under way to begin the process of forming a “canon” of negotiation. This effort has been led by Chris Honeyman and Andrea Schneider, and its major output is an 80-contributing-author reference book, The Negotiator’s Fieldbook (Schneider and Honeyman, ABA 2006). The book, among other things, argues the need for “advanced” courses in negotiation, of a highly interdisciplinary type and across many different types of schools. But a subsequent article by Chris ("A Sale of Land in Somerset County", Negotiation Journal, April 2007) has already reconsidered this premise, and concluded that many “simple” negotiations may require knowledge which even as recently as the publication date of the book had been considered only for an “advanced” level.
c) Since 2005, ADR Center has been running a major EU-funded project across the entire Middle East, which seeks to create workable systems of commercial mediation and arbitration in 10 countries (details at www.adrmeda.org). Together with ADR Center’s major new project in Turkey and some even more recent efforts in Nigeria and elsewhere, this experience has underlined the differences in perception of how negotiation works or ought to work across different cultures. But it has also provided us with an unprecedented network of negotiation practitioners, scholars and users in a number of countries that have been underrepresented in our field. (For examples, see list of speakers at the ADR MEDA project’s largest conference).
d) The distinguished series of articles on pedagogy published by Negotiation Journal, together with other initiatives of the Journal’s parent, the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School has often questioned the effectiveness of current teaching of negotiation, and offered fresh alternatives.
