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The Art of Communicating Arbitral Judgments - Chapter 40 - AAA Handbook on Commercial Arbitration - 2nd Edition

Author(s): 
Charles J. Coleman
Gladys Gershenfeld
Page Count: 
18 pages
Media Description: 
PDF from "AAA Handbook on Commercial Arbitration - 2nd Edition"
Published: 
September, 2010
Jurisdictions: 
United States
Practice Areas: 
Delivery and Receipt of Communications,
Failure to Arbitrate; Default,
Commencement of Arbitral Proceeding
Author Detail: 

Charles J. Coleman was Professor Emeritus at the School of Business, Rutgers University in Camden, N.J. He holds a B.S. from St. Joseph's, an M.S. from Cornell, a Ph.D. and an M.B.A. from SUNY Buffalo. He was a member of the National Academy of Arbitrators.

Gladys Gershenfeld is former Associate Professor of Industrial Relations at Philadelphia University. She is a member of the National Academy of Arbitrators. She holds a B.S. from Boston University and an M.S. from Cornell University.

 

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Description: 
 
I. Introduction
 
Arbitrators are selected for their judgment and their ability to communicate that judgment. While many books and articles discuss aspects of arbitral judgment, very few address the way that arbitrators communicate those judgments. A recently published bibliography of labor arbitration, for example, contained annotations of 1,336 books, monographs, journal articles and proceedings.1 Only seven entries addressed decision writing, and the standard bibles such as Elkouri and Elkouri2 or Bornstein, Gosline, and Greenbaum3 do not examine the topic at all.
 
Richard Mittenthal says that arbitration opinions make “dreary reading,” and he wonders whether the parties actually read most of the opinions given to them.4 Benjamin Aaron says that the landscape of most arbitral awards is bleak. Many of the awards he read indicated that “the writers lacked not only a sense of form, but also knowledge of the fundamental principles of grammar and syntax. In the wilderness of arbitral rhetoric, one encounters a host of solecisms, misplaced modifiers, dangling participles, and outright misuse of words.”
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