Negotiation and mediation not only make appealing dispute resolution alternatives for lawyers, but they also teach valuable lessons in communication and empathy. To help teach those lessons, volunteers from Fordham Law School’s Dispute Resolution Society attend weekly sessions with high school students at Martin Luther King, Jr. High to instruct them in dispute resolution techniques like arbitration, mediation, and negotiation. The Dispute Resolution Society has a community service requirement, which many members fulfill by volunteering at the high school. Every Friday, the Dispute Resolution Society community service editor and a group of society members lead an interactive conflict resolution workshop with the seniors, giving the students a new hypothetical case each week. Following a classwide discussion, the students split into groups; each group is assigned a client in that week’s case, and after going over the details with Fordham volunteers, the students stage mock negotiations. In the last minutes of class, the group reconvenes to share their results and explain what they gleaned from the exercise.
The Dispute Resolution Society makes sure to select issues that will interest the students. For instance, one mediation scenario this semester will involve a hypothetical MMA fighter contracted by a video game company to play a character in a forthcoming game. The students will learn negotiation tactics while discussing the terms of the contract, balancing the fighter’s needs with those of the video game company. But just because the Dispute Resolution Society crafts issues to interest the students does not mean the real conflict resolution work is in any way overly simplified for the high school students—each session “almost parallels what we’re doing ourselves in our classes and in our books,” says Caitlyn Beauchamp ’21.
The seniors, in turn, can often augment and inform the DRS volunteers’ own legal studies with their unique points of view. “They prove to be really creative and insightful when trying to solve complicated issues, and they often provide a fresh and different perspective from what we see in our everyday studies at Fordham,” remarks Samuel Wechsler ’20.
Beauchamp will serve as this year’s community service editor for the Dispute Resolution Society. Last year, in her experience volunteering, she was pleased to see how engaged the students became as each session progressed. “At the beginning of class, we were asking questions like, ‘Why is litigation a bad thing?’ and no one was raising their hand,” she notes. “But at the end of a half-hour negotiation, we’d ask who reached agreements, and the kids who had shot up their hands and those who hadn’t were quick to explain why.”
Some society members are only able to attend one session of the program, but those who can are often inspired to return. As last year’s community service editor, Wechsler attended every meeting of the program, and he says that the highlight of his experience was watching the high school students develop intellectually and emotionally. “By the end of the program, their ability to clearly communicate their goals and interests improves significantly,” he says, “Which will undoubtedly prove useful not only in negotiation but in everyday life.”