Book Review Essay

Getting Disputes Resolved is an important addition to the growing body of scholarly and how-to-do-it literature on disputing and dispute processing. It offers guidelines and advice on designing and implementing dispute resolution systems that are based on the authors' experience as designers of dispute resolution systems in the coal industry. The authors are among the more prominent scholar-practitioners in the dispute resolution field. William L. Ury, associate director of the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School, co-authored (with R. Fisher) Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreements Without Giving In.

Jeanne M. Brett, J.L. Kellogg Professor of Dispute Resolutions and Organizations at the Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University, helped develop dispute resolution teaching materials in use at over 100 business schools. Stephen B. Goldberg, Professor of Law at Northwestern University Law School, coauthored (with E. Green and F. Sander) Dispute Resolution, which won the 1985 Center for Public Resources book prize for excellence and innovation in alternative dispute resolution. The authors hope the book will be read by those who handle disputes as part of their profession, those who want to improve the way their organization deals with disputes, organizational consultants who discover that a dispute resolution system is part of a problem they have been asked to solve, and scholars and students interested in alternative dispute resolution systems.