Business and Negotiation in the USA

Academic program

Course Description:  This course will give participants an introduction to important aspects of the U.S. legal system.  Some aspects of the American legal tradition are drawn from other nations and societies, but many are distinctive.  Our primary emphasis will be on the American system of government as it affects the development of law, as well as on the procedure and structure of the civil litigation process.  It is through the machinery of adjudication that the American legal system can be best understood.  We will, therefore, study the jurisdiction and makeup of American courts, and trace the major stages of a lawsuit in the United States.  In the process we will learn about the structure of the American Constitution, about the role of judges and lawyers and about the adversary system – as well as about Alternative Dispute Resolution, the fastest-growing method of case disposition in the United States.  Although our emphasis will be on civil procedure, we will be able to compare it with the American criminal and administrative justice systems in the United States.  In other words, we will touch upon many major strands of American law in a general way.  But we will look at civil litigation in some depth.

Course Materials: Information about course materials will be provided one month before the beginning of the course..

ACADEMIC DIRECTION

PROFESSOR ALEXANDRA CARTER

Alexandra Carter is a Clinical Professor of Law and the Director of the Mediation Clinic at Columbia Law School. Since 2012, she also has served as the Law School’s Director of Clinical Programs, providing leadership in the area of experiential teaching and learning.

Professor Carter’s teaching, research and publications lie in the field of alternative dispute resolution, primarily in mediation and negotiation. She has been sought as a trainer on mediation, civil procedure, negotiation and dispute systems design for many different groups from private and public sectors, including the United Nations, U.S. courts and federal agencies, private corporations and law firms.  She has addressed the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences Rule of Law Conference, the 5^th World Peace Conference in Jakarta, the ICU-CLS Peace Summit in Tokyo, and the Ceará Supreme Court Conference on Mediation; and has contributed as a faculty speaker at universities in South America, Asia and Europe. She has served on the Alternative Dispute Resolution Committee for the New York City Bar Association, as well as the Mediator Ethics Advisory Committee for the New York State Unified Court System.

Prior to joining the Columbia faculty, Professor Carter was associated with Cravath, Swaine & Moore LLP, where she worked as part of a team defending against a multibillion dollar securities class action lawsuit related to the Enron collapse, served as the senior antitrust associate on several multibillion dollar mergers, and handled cases involving copyright law.

Professor Carter received her Juris Doctor degree in 2003 from Columbia Law School, where she earned James Kent and Harlan Fiske Stone academic honors. She also won the Jane Marks Murphy Prize for clinical advocacy and the Lawrence S. Greenbaum Prize for the best oral argument in the 2002 Harlan Fiske Stone Moot Court Competition. After earning her degree, Professor Carter clerked for the Hon. Mark L. Wolf, U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts in Boston.