Advanced Dispute Intervention (LAWS90080)

As lawyers’ roles change and complex issues that do not fit within traditional boundaries increasingly arise, new sets of skills and capacities are needed. These skills and mental habits set the most successful negotiators, dispute intervenors and advocates apart from others. Participants in this interactive subject will increase their practical effectiveness as representatives and third parties by learning a series of mental habits and concrete skills to deepen their capacities as change agents. Leveraging new material on neuroscience, empirical studies of negotiation, effective negotiators’ cognitive habits and systems theory, the subject will both complement and challenge longheld assumptions about optimal ways to engage disputes. Via experiential and case study approaches, we will deepen our capacities and skills for complex dispute analysis, creative problem-solving and cultural fluency. The subject will be useful for those working on a wide range of complex issues in a range of contexts including commercial, environmental/public policy and human rights.

Drawing on current interdisciplinary literature and case examples from scholarly and practice sources, students will:

• Learn an original framework for dispute analysis and associated processes to address deep-rooted disputes
• Analyse personal and shared cognitive habits, patterns and biases in relation to dispute engagement, identifying optimal cognitive habits and developing strategies for integrating and applying these new habits
• Critically analyse implicit meanings and cultural values of a continuum of dispute resolution processes as applied in a variety of sectors and settings, including private and public sector organisations and communities, and learn principles of culturally fluent design
• Practice simulated intervention in complex disputes in ways that synthesise and apply creative problem-solving informed by systems theory and neuroscience
• Experience and apply a wide range of ways to increase intuition, improve focus and enhance lawyers’ capacities to accompany or lead change processes
• Learn tools and heuristics to evaluate how and when creative problem-solving approaches can be integrated into existing dispute-engagement systems.

Successful completion of the subject will expand participants’ abilities for complex issue analysis, intervention and follow-up as third parties, participants or advocates in negotiation and dispute resolution processes. Students will learn valuable skills of integrative thinking and creativity through experiential exercises and the final paper.