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Negotiation as Law’s Shadow:
On the Jurisprudence of Roger Fisher
Amy J. Cohen
Editors’ Note: The author reviews the life work of one of negotiation’s most famous scholars, and reveals a wholly new observation. Roger Fisher, she argues, did not understand negotiation as primarily something that happens in the shadow of the law. Rather, based on his years thinking about international conflict, Fisher offered a theory of negotiation as a form of legal ordering and, by extension, a theory of law as a form of negotiation—one with enduring relevance for dispute resolution today.
The Physician’s Desk Reference provides medical practitioners with important contextual information, such as regulatory warnings, indications and contraindications, about the prescriptions they dispense to people in the world. This contribution to the Negotiator’s Desk Reference follows suit. There is perhaps no more influential negotiation practitioner—with no more set of influential negotiation diagnoses and prescriptions—than Roger Fisher. Fisher’s classic, Getting to Yes, co-authored with William Ury, has a circulation in the millions in more than 30 languages (Wheeler and Waters 2006). And as Fisher made clear in a response to a criticism of the book, he is far more concerned with “what intelligent people ought to do than with ‘the way the world is’” (Fisher 1984: 120). That is, Fisher dispenses prescriptions, leaving it to others to make visible some of the embedded assumptions and normative commitments that underlie his advice—that is, to provide an explanation of the chemical constitution of the remedies on offer, if I may draw out this desk reference analogy just a bit more.
In the spirit of a reference work that aims to enable practitioners to consider when, why and under what conditions they should dispense a particular prescription, this short essay describes one foundational element of Fisher’s negotiation advice. This element, perhaps surprisingly, is Fisher’s theory of the function and purpose of law. Fisher, we shall see, understood negotiation as a form of legal ordering. What I thus call Fisher’s “jurisprudence of negotiation” should help practitioners evaluate the normative desirability of negotiation—at least as Fisher understood it—not simply as a set of skills and techniques but rather as a kind of legal process applied to private and public conflicts across local, national, and transnational scales.
So what does Roger Fisher, an international lawyer and law professor as much as a world-famous theorist and practitioner of negotiation, think about law? From simply reading Getting to Yes, one might conclude that he thought about it very little. In Getting to Yes, law features in brief and sporadic ways. When Fisher and Ury describe objective criteria, they list “what a court would decide” alongside market value, scientific judgment, and tradition (Fisher, Ury, and Patton 1991: 85). What law is and whether it is a special or distinct criterion is not discussed. To the contrary, the list presents law as simply one tool among many—coequal with the market, various sources of authority, and private norms. Fisher’s earlier work, however, suggests that he had an explicit theory of law as a special approach to conflict resolution—a theory left implicit in his later writings, but that, I argue, informed his practices of negotiation in important and intrinsic ways.
To make sense of how Fisher’s theory of law evolved, it is worth revisiting some of the international jurisprudential debates of the 1960s of which Fisher was a part. Like many international legal scholars of his day, Fisher engaged a pressing legal question: why do states comply with law? To answer this question, he began by rejecting John Austin’s classic theory of law as a command of the sovereign backed by force (Austin 1873; Fisher 1961: 1131). The Austinian view was marshaled by legal scholars who argued that international law is not “real” law that demands compliance. In a 1961 Harvard Law Review article, “Bringing Law to Bear on Governments,” Fisher claimed it was “woolly thinking” to draw a sharp distinction between domestic law as real and international law as not. He argued that in practice, states regularly limit themselves via legal rules even in the absence of compelling sovereign force. This is because, Fisher ventured, of a mix of rational incentives and a moral commitment or belief in law. Law, he concluded, affects what states do when it serves states’ interests and instantiates their beliefs.
At the same time, however, Fisher also challenged the realist international relations approach of Myres McDougal as overemphasizing or collapsing law into state policy (Fisher 1962). McDougal, Fisher’s con....
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For full contents please purchase The Negotiator’s Desk Reference.
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