John Barton, RIP

I just learned the sad news of the passing of Professor John Barton of my alma mater, Stanford Law School. The Stanford Law press release can be found here.  John was a dedicated and learned scholar, a wonderful mentor and a delightful man to be around.  He will be greatly missed.

I was fortunate to get to know John during my first year of law school when he invited me to join a team of law and political science graduate students he had assembled to conduct a study on international conflict mediation for the Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict.  It was my first “professional” academic project, and I was excited to be part of something that connected what lawyers do to the problems of the real world.  As I got to know John better, I came to understand that the ideas that lawyers should first and foremost solve problems animated all his work.  And it was an impressive body of work, which drew from his training and experience as a research engineer and from his love of the law, and bridged science, technology, intellectual property, globalization, and justice.

As our mediation project evolved, John invited me to serve with him and Melanie Greenberg (then of the Stanford Center for International Security and Cooperation) as co-editor of the final book.  It was an act of generosity by a senior scholar and teacher to a rather green law student, and one which it is fair to say altered the trajectory of my career. In the course of finishing the book, I picked up several of John’s very useful research and writing habits – many of which I maintain to this day (e.g., if you have trouble with a paragraph, type in “MORE TO COME HERE” and move on).  I have one particularly vivid memory of the project:  Delivering the final research findings to the Carnegie advisory group at a meeting in New York.  It was an impressive — and for me, intimidating! — group, co-chaired by Cy Vance and David Hamburg, and including, among others, Abe and Toni Chayes, Hans Corell, Theodor Meron, Oscar Schachter, and Paul Szasz.  That group asked tough questions, bringing together the weight of their collective experience and academic expertise, forcing us to rethink our early conclusions and reframe parts of our approach to the dynamics between law and mediation.  John taught me a great deal during the following months about responding to critiques (always graciously, even when you disagreed with them) and molding our empirical data and case studies into a coherent and useful framework for understanding how and when law does (or does not) facilitate conflict resolution.  He also taught me how to cabin and present findings.  He hoped — as we all did — that our book would be helpful; that it would provide some lessons learned about past mediations and some theoretical structure for future mediation efforts. It was a modest goal but at the same time was motivated by the best idealist traditions of lawyers:  That we can make a difference and improve the world.

I am grateful to have known and worked with John and sad that we lost him so soon.