Rethinking Negotiation Teaching (RNT) Project

 

This ambitious project set out to redesign how negotiation is taught worldwide. Headed by Chris Honeyman and James Coben (with Sharon Press, Andrew Wei-Min Lee and Giuseppe De Palo co-directing different phases), the project was administered by the Dispute Resolution Institute (now at Mitchell-Hamline Law School, then at Hamline.) The invited participants included key scholars and practitioners from approximately 20 countries and a variety of fields. The project’s three meetings (Rome, 2008; Istanbul, 2009; Beijing, 2011) resulted in the publications described below. Note: a generous grant from the JAMS Foundation permitted the organizers to publish the full text of all four books without charge in PDF form. The first book in the series, Rethinking Negotiation Teaching, is also now available in Chinese, Arabic and Turkish translations.

The project was largely a consequence of discoveries made in the course of putting together The Negotiator’s Fieldbook, and a subsequent Chris Honeyman article about that book and its implications (A Sale of Land, free in PDF) crystallized the need for the new project. The Fieldbook stood for more than a decade as the most ambitious effort yet undertaken to capture the full range of new knowledge about negotiation. In turn the Fieldbook, published 2006 by the American Bar Association, was the culmination of Chris Honeyman’s Broad Field project. [As of the end of 2017 the Negotiator’s Desk Reference (NDR) superseded the Fieldbook. And in 2019 the American Bar Association published Negotiation Essentials for Lawyers, from the same editors as the Fieldbook and the NDR.] More recently, the Rethinking project is one of two predecessors of Project Seshat, along with the Canon of Negotiation initiative.

Key Publications: