Interview With Recipients of 2005 NIACR  Book Award

On October 17, 2005 the National Institute for Advanced Conflict Resolution announced the winner of its 2005 book award. This award is given annually by the Institute to a book published in the United States that shows the best promise of promoting and contributing to the field of conflict resolution. This year's winner is "The Handbook of Dispute Resolution," a dispute resolution practitioner's guide edited by Michael L Moffitt and Robert C. Bordone. 

Michael L. Moffitt

Robert C. Bordone

NIACR: Hello Gentlemen, thanks for meeting with me today, and congratulations on winning the book award. Let’s start by confirming some biographical information. Bob, you're currently the Thaddeus R. Beal Lecturer on Law at Harvard Law School and the deputy director of the Harvard Negotiation Research Project at Harvard Law School, is that correct?

Bordone: That is correct.

NIACR: And Michael, you are currently an Associate professor and the Associate director of the Appropriate Dispute Resolution Program at the University of Oregon School of Law, correct?

Moffitt: That is…yep.

NIACR: If each of you could respond to this question...maybe you first Bob, how did you get involved in the field of dispute resolution?

Bordone: Well, I was a student at the Harvard Law School back in the late 90’s and, I always had an interest in negotiation, but my interest is not exactly what the topic turned out to be. That is to say, I always had an interest in arguing and thought, "Oh, negotiation is all about arguing." So I took the negotiation class here at the Harvard Law School when I was a second year law student, and was quite surprised to find out that it had very little to do with arguing, and a lot to do with listening, and I just got taken by it. So, I basically got more and more involved in the work of the program here, starting out as a teaching assistant and a research assistant, and working with people like Frank Sander and Bob Mnookin, and as my time evolved in law school, this really became the focus of my studies and the focus of the way I spent my extra curricular time, and that was it. So I clerked for a judge for a year, then came back and started teaching here. But it wasn’t an interest I had in terms of really knowing the topic or material, really, until I got to law school.

NIACR: Michael?

Moffitt: I’m completely different. I applied to Harvard specifically to study negotiation and dispute resolution, and I knew from the time that I was in college that this was the field that I wanted to devote my professional energies to. In fact I wasn’t even committed to going to law school as much as I was committed to doing graduate studies that would support dispute resolution as a process. So, when I was looking at graduate programs… this would have been in the late 80’s… the school that stood out to me as the place most attractive was Harvard because of the Program on Negotiation, and when I was trying to figure out how one got to work on the Program on Negotiation, I just called them up and asked what kinds of students they had working there. The answer I got back initially was, "Well, we don’t really have students working with us," and I said "Oh, come on, you’ve got to have some students," and they said "Well, we have some law students who work with us," and I asked why, and they said "Because we’re housed at the law school." So I applied to the law school. If that sounds incredibly single-focused, that’s accurate. This really was the field I thought I wanted to do, and I am lucky enough to still think that.

NIACR: Ok. When did you first get the idea for publishing "The Handbook of Dispute Resolution?"

Moffitt: I first heard about the idea from Frank Sander who asked me in June of… and Bob you may need to help me on which year that would have been.

Bordone: 2003.

Moffitt: Ok. In June of 2003 I was back teaching at the PIL Program [Editor’s note: "PIL Program" is the Program of Instruction for Lawyers, offered by the Harvard Law School.] and one evening Frank and I were on a walk and he said, "Do you think it would be a good idea for the field to have something like..?" and then he described a project much like the way the handbook ultimately came out, and I said, "Absolutely," and that I thought that it would be a good idea, and that it was high time that we drew together practitioners and scholars from different disciplinary perspectives in one volume. After I told him I thought it would be a great idea, he then asked a follow-up question, "Do you think I, Frank, ought to get involved in that" and I said, "Of course you should, you’re Frank Sander and I can’t think of anybody who’d be better at doing that." Then sometime later he said, "Well would you have any interest in being part of that project?" and I said "Of course I would, you’re Frank Sander." After that we left it and I didn’t hear anything about it for a while, and then Bob and I had some conversations about it. So Bob maybe you can fill in the story from there.

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