Negotiation (LAW272H1S)

Note: Classes will run for three hours and the course will go for eight weeks.

Note: Seminars are cumulative, therefore, attendance is mandatory, subject to emergencies. Students on the waitlist will be penalized for classes missed during the add/drop period in the same way they are during the rest of the term. Students on the waitlist are to attend all classes while on the waitlist.

Although most of us negotiate countless times every day, in both personal and work-related contexts, few of us ever sit back to analyze whether we negotiate well and whether we can improve our negotiation technique. Negotiation is a skill that can be learned and improved by practising and experimenting.

This will be a course in doing. Students will negotiate a number of hypothetical fact scenarios, and will analyze the results and techniques used. We will also have a number of classroom "exercises" designed to help improve negotiating skills. By the end of the course, I hope that students will be able to go into any negotiation confident that they have learned techniques that will consistently produce a "good" result. The theories taught in the course will be based on those in the book Getting To Yes by Roger Fisher, William Ury and Bruce Patton (3rd edition). There will not be a lot of required outside reading.