2025 New Voices in Dispute Resolution Goldberg Scholars

State v. Defendant v. Victim: The Emerging Triptych

Becca Donaldson, Marquette University

American criminal courts generally consist of two parties who wrest control over the case: prosecutor and defendant.  Increasingly, those deemed “victims” have gained legal authority to assert their standing in criminal courtrooms—not only at sentencing, but prior to disposition—disrupting the two-party adversarial model.  While these developments raise many implications, this Article will argue that standing does not make victims a “party” to a criminal case for legal, philosophical, historical, and practical reasons.  Given this, crime victims who assert standing to gain control over the process used to address the harm done onto them may better meet their interests through alternative dispute resolution, such as restorative justice.

Getting to Getting to Yes: The Emergence of Interest-Based Negotiation Theory and Negotiation as Self-Crafting

Nicolas Parra-Herrera, University of Utah

This project has two parts. The first traces the making of one of the most influential books on negotiation in the 20th century: Roger Fisher and William Ury’s Getting to Yes: Negotiating Without Giving In (1981). Getting to Yes popularized interest-based negotiation theory, which shifted the field away from positional bargaining toward uncovering underlying interests and generating options for mutual gain. I examine how this framework emerged from Roger Fisher’s life, ideas, and collaborations, as well as his intellectual influences. Fisher’s earlier work on international law and nuclear war prevention increasingly emphasized perception as a tool for shaping behavior and influencing outcomes. This insight became central to interest-based negotiation. I argue that the theory popularized in Getting to Yes was the product of a collaborative, interdisciplinary effort grounded in the belief that negotiation involves not only joint problem-solving but also the shaping of perception.

The second part argues that Getting to Yes initiated a broader transformation in negotiation theory, later developed through “GTY spin-off” projects such as Difficult Conversations (1999), Beyond Reason (2006), and Winning from Within (2013). These works mark a shift from an institutional, problem-solving conception of alternative dispute resolution (ADR) toward a model focused on the self. Rather than “fitting the forum to the fuss,” this tradition seeks to “fit the selves to the fuss.” I show how negotiation evolved into an art of self-crafting, with workshops and frameworks that cultivate ethical dispositions and ways of being.