Two correlational studies test the hypothesis that procedural justice, or fairness of process, plays a role in acceptance of agreements reached through bilateral negotiation. Both studies test the relationship between the fairness of the process used to resolve a dispute, objective monetary outcomes, subjective assessments of outcome favorability, and subjective assessments of outcome fairness. Additionally, the second study tests the hypothesis that negotiations characterized by greater procedural justice result in more potential for integrative bargaining. The results suggest that procedural justice encourages the acceptance of negotiated agreements, as well as leading to the opportunity for increased integrative bargaining.
Robert Mnookin and Lewis Kornhauser’s 1979 article, Bargaining in the Shadow of the Law: The Case of Divorce, marked a critical watershed moment for the dispute resolution field on many levels. First, the article was at the vanguard of a now decades-old movement to take negotiation seriously as an academic field. Second, the article modeled and encouraged context-specific negotiation analysis as it delved deeply into the context-specific nature of dispute resolution, first developing a careful analytical framework for analysis and then applying it to a particular field of bargaining—namely, the area of divorce. Third, and most significantly, the article grappled with the interstitial space between the human behavior of “bargaining” and legal endowments, and it was ultimately instrumental in bringing that interstitial space into the purview of legal scholarship. I address each of these contributions in turn....
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