The Williston Negotiation Competition is an annual negotiation and contract drafting competition at Harvard Law School for the 1L class.
Students work in paired teams of two, with each team representing a side in a complex business deal. At the end of the competition, each pair of teams submits a single contract, and each side submits a private memo to its client explaining why the client should accept the agreement.
The competition is judged by experienced negotiators from private practice and the Harvard Program on Negotiation. Teams are evaluated on three basic factors: value creation, value claiming, and contract drafting. Prizes are awarded to the team pairing that produces the best overall agreement as well as the two teams that best represent the interests of their respective sides in the negotiation.
Now in its 61st year, the competition honors Samuel Williston, professor at Harvard Law School from 1895 to 1938 and author of a classic treatise on contracts.
Roger D. Fisher was Samuel Williston Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and director of the Harvard Negotiation Project.
Williston may refer to:
Samuel Williston was an American lawyer and law professor who authored an influential treatise on contracts.
Scott Dean Boras is an American sports agent, specializing in baseball. He is the founder, owner and president of the Boras Corporation, a sports agency based in Newport Beach, California, that represents roughly 175 professional baseball clients.
The term zone of possible agreement (ZOPA), also known as zone of potential agreement or bargaining range, describes the range of options available to two parties involved in sales and negotiation, where the respective minimum targets of the parties overlap. Where no such overlap is given, in other words where there is no rational agreement possibility, the inverse notion of NOPA applies. Where there is a ZOPA, an agreement within the zone is rational for both sides. Outside the zone no amount of negotiation should yield an agreement.
The Program on Negotiation (PON) is a university consortium dedicated to developing the theory and practice of negotiation and dispute resolution. As a community of scholars and practitioners, PON serves a unique role in the world negotiation community. Founded in 1983 as a special research project at Harvard Law School, PON includes faculty, students, and staff from Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Tufts University, and Brandeis University.
Alvin Nugent "Bo" McMillin was an American football player and coach at the collegiate and professional level. He played college football at Centre College in Danville, Kentucky, where he was a three-time All-American at quarterback, and led the Centre Praying Colonels to an upset victory over Harvard in 1921. McMillin was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame as a player as part of its inaugural 1951 class.
Sports law in the United States overlaps substantially with labor law, contract law, competition or antitrust law, and tort law. Issues like defamation and privacy rights are also integral aspects of sports law. This area of law was established as a separate and important entity only a few decades ago, coinciding with the rise of player-agents and increased media scrutiny of sports law topics.
The 1921 Centre vs. Harvard football game was a regular-season collegiate American football game played on October 29, 1921, at Harvard Stadium in Boston, Massachusetts. The contest featured the undefeated Centre Praying Colonels, representing Centre College, and the undefeated Harvard Crimson, representing Harvard University. Centre won the game 6–0, despite entering as heavy underdogs, leading to the game being widely viewed as one of the largest upsets in college football history. The game is often referred to by the shorthand C6H0; this originated shortly after the game when a Centre professor remarked that Harvard had been poisoned by this "impossible" chemical formula.
Harvard Business School (HBS) is the graduate business school of Harvard University, a private Ivy League research university. Located in Allston, Massachusetts, HBS owns Harvard Business Publishing, which publishes business books, leadership articles, case studies, and Harvard Business Review, a monthly academic business magazine. It is also home to the Baker Library/Bloomberg Center, the school's primary library.
Paul F. Levy is an American businessman, author, professor, and was elected on Nov 2, 2021 to a two-year term for the Ward 6 seat on the Newton (MA) School Committee. He is noted for his use of social media in health care leadership roles, and has been the subject of academic research and Harvard Business School case studies about the role of social media in important and complex negotiations.
Lawrence E. Susskind is a scholar of conflict resolution and consensus-building in urban planning. He is one of the founders of the field of public dispute mediation and is a practicing international mediator through the Consensus Building institute. He has taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology since 1971, where he is Ford Professor of Environmental Planning.
Harvard Innovation Labs (i-Lab) is an institution which aims to promote team-based and entrepreneurial activities among Harvard students, faculty, entrepreneurs, and members of the Allston and Greater Boston communities.
Robert Harris Mnookin is an American lawyer, author, and the Samuel Williston Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. He focuses largely on dispute resolution, negotiation, and arbitration and was one of the primary co-arbitrators that resolved a 7-year software rights dispute between IBM and Fujitsu in the 1980s. Mnookin has been the Chair of the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School since 1994.
David G. Fubini currently serves as a Senior lecturer and Henry B. Arthur Fellow at Harvard Business School. He is also co-leader of the Leading Professional Services Firm Program for Harvard Business School's Executive Education. He currently teaches 6 core courses in the Harvard MBA program and also teaches elective curriculum.
James K. Sebenius is an American economist, currently the Gordon Donaldson Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School as well as co-founder and partner of Lax Sebenius LLC, specializes in analyzing and advising corporations and governments worldwide on their most complex and challenging negotiations.
Michael A. Wheeler has taught negotiation at Harvard Business School in its MBA program, executive courses, and, more recently, its digital learning platform HBX. His work focuses on negotiation pedagogy, improvisation in complex dynamic processes, ethics and moral decisionmaking, and a range of alternative dispute resolution (ADR) processes. For twenty years he was the Editor in Chief of Negotiation Journal, published by the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School. As a LinkedIn Influencer, he has more than 200,000 followers. As a negotiation advisor, Wheeler has counseled corporate clients, trade organizations, and government agencies on issues in the United States and abroad.
The Harvard Graduate Students Union (HGSU), officially known as Harvard Graduate Students Union United Auto Workers (HGSU-UAW), is a labor union representing graduate students, teaching assistants, and other student employees at Harvard University. The bargaining unit comprises about 5,000 student employees, including graduate students working as research assistants and teaching fellows as well as several hundred undergraduate students holding teaching positions. Contract negotiations with the university are scheduled to begin in Fall 2018. HGSU is affiliated with the United Auto Workers labor union, whose 400,000 members include 45,000 graduate students and 30,000 academic workers.
David Lax is an American negotiation expert, author, speaker, statistician and academic. He is currently a Distinguished Fellow at the Harvard Negotiation Project, Managing Principal of Lax Sebenius LLC, a firm that advises companies and governments in challenging and complex negotiations, and a former professor at Harvard Business School.