Bargaining without Law

Robert J. Condlin, University of Maryland School of Law

Abstract

Like a professional athlete on growth hormones, legal bargaining scholarship has transformed itself over the years. Once an amateurish assortment of war stories and folk tales, now it is a hulking behemoth of social science study and experimentation. There is a lot to like in this transformation. Much of the new writing is insightful, sophisticated, and spirited, with things to tell even the most experienced bargainer. But it also lacks something important: the law. Bargaining scholars now routinely write about dispute settlement as if the strength of the parties’ competing legal claims is of no consequence. Rarely do they discuss substantive legal argument. And when they do, it usually is in terms of whether it is strategically “framed,” or “anchored,” rather than whether it is well reasoned and supported by evidence (i.e., persuasive). This is a serious mistake. At its core, a legal dispute is a disagreement about the meaning of law, and it must be resolved on substantive grounds if the resolution is to be legitimate and lasting. Psychological and social workarounds may paper over a dispute, or suppress it, for a time but they will not resolve it. To be helpful, bargaining scholarship must describe how legal claims can be argued within the social conventions of face-to-face conversation, without polarizing relationships, producing lingering animosities, and provoking recrimination spirals. This is the heart of bargaining; the rest is sideshow. In this article I attempt to describe how this is done.