Zen Body, Zen Mind: Can a Law Student Learn Mediation in Law School?

Law school, like lawyering, runs on rules.Discourse is outcome-directed.Communication must persuade.Persuasion must achieve results.Results must further victory in the adversarial battle of wit.Victory is (often) a zero-sum game.To become a good lawyer, the student must learn to thrive within a highly competitive law school environment, a training ground where she is questioned, excoriated, dissembled, then reconstructed from flesh and bone until she has learned how to "think like a lawyer."This process works well, as any lawyer who has had the pleasure of working with bright externs will attest.But when the law provides an ill-fitting remedy for the legal, monetary, or emotional afflictions that plague legal players, experts recommend a different game altogether.Alternative methods of conflict resolution take center stage.Recognizing the importance of alternative dispute resolution to the training of future lawyers, many topranking law schools offer arbitration and mediation courses, replete with award winning professors and highly sought-after mediators.To become a good mediator, the student must learn how to be present in the moment, to listen actively to words spoken and unspoken, and to recognize inchoate interests.The game has changed, but the training field remains the same: mediation classes and clinics are still couched within the framework of a competitive law school environment.This paradigm creates a tension between the goals of mediation and the goals of academic success, and students risk conflating successful mediation with settlement outcomes.When the mediation clinic is graded, conflicts of interest hamper the learning process, as students may be disincentivized to focus on what is best for the parties, primed instead to produce extrinsic measures of success-at any cost.Drawing from the author's experiences in mediation clinic and Tibetan Buddhist monasteries, this brief preamble to a future article chronicles the challenges of academizing mediation training, offering suggestions for improving the mediation-clinic experience by removing grades and adding an element on proxemics.In our new world shaped by international conflicts and crises of global dimensions, the author posits that the most effective mediators are those who have not forgotten how to be human.