Steve was a close friend and colleague to us both. He contributed to the dispute resolution field in several significant ways. From our perspective, the most important was his development of the theory of systems design. Collaborating with coauthors Jeanne Brett and Bill Ury, Getting Disputes Resolved, published in 1988, gave a name to and described the various processes for resolving large numbers of repetitive disputes in organizations. The ideas have been replicated in different institutional settings ever since, ranging from schools and hospitals to both profit-making and nonprofit corporations. Although the phrase “systems design” is sometimes replaced with “disputes system design” or “process architecture,” the activities encompassed in the term, including organizing internal focus groups to identify problems, collaboratively designing processes to deal with the problems, training administrators and users, and evaluating results, have survived and proliferated in different environments and continue to grow.
A second innovation was created when Steve collaborated with Bill Hopgood to create and test “med-arb” processes to deal with the frequent labor disputes in the coal industry. We will leave the details to others more familiar with the experiment, but we do know that it succeeded in resolving many disputes.
Steve was part of the original and subsequent triumvirates with Frank Sander, Eric Green, and later Nancy Rogers and Sarah Cole, in writing and publishing the first comprehensive law school textbook in the field, Dispute Resolution. Having admired and taught from this compendium we can attest to its completeness and readability, including excerpts from opposing viewpoints and questions for students to consider. Keeping the book current, since its original publication in 1985 and consistently updated to its seventh edition in 2020, has been a massive endeavor.
As a side note, Michael was working at the National Institute for Dispute Resolution (NIDR) at the time. NIDR, primarily funded by the Ford, MacArthur, and Hewlett Foundations, was founded in 1982 to encourage the growth and development of dispute resolution. One of its goals was to spur additional teaching about dispute resolution in graduate schools of law, business, planning, public administration, and public policy. NIDR provided financial support for the development of the first edition of Dispute Resolution.
We also have Steve to thank for his generous assistance in starting our own law school teaching. Not only did he spend time discussing the peculiarities of teaching in a regular law school class (previously, we had taught specialized week- or days-long classes for interested professionals), he also freely shared his own syllabi, simulations, and teaching materials.
In addition to being a beloved mediator and arbitrator, Steve was an important trainer of both mediators and arbitrators. He and his wife Jeanne Brett pioneered the idea of teaching law students and business students together, in order to prepare the law students to act as advocates and the business school students as clients in mediations. We collaborated with Steve in training lawyers and labor professionals to mediate and to represent parties in mediations. Although we did not always agree among ourselves (Steve was sometimes more evaluative than we might have been), we always enjoyed the back and forth and suspect that participants found the repartee challenging.
Aside from Steve’s great professional achievements, he was a very good friend. We saw him whenever he got to Washington and traveled with him and his family members in France and Turkey. He helped us to rent a house near his beloved second home in Venasque (a town so small that one had to go elsewhere to find a café). We and two of our children spent a lovely two weeks there, along with Linda’s sister, husband, and children.
We always looked forward to Steve’s trips to Washington during the years when he was working regularly for the United States Postal Service. We enjoyed the dinners (and French wine) with him and took advantage of every opportunity to catch up. We missed him in his last years when he no longer could travel and will continue to miss him in the years to come.
