Conflict is inevitable, in both deals and disputes. Yet when clients call in the lawyers to haggle over who gets how much of the pie, traditional hard-bargaining tactics can lead to ruin. Too often, deals blow up, cases don’t settle, relationships fall apart, justice is delayed. Beyond Winning charts a way out of our current crisis of confidence in the legal system. It offers a fresh look at negotiation, aimed at helping lawyers turn disputes into deals, and deals into better deals, through practical, tough-minded problem-solving techniques.

In this step-by-step guide to conflict resolution, the authors describe the many obstacles that can derail a legal negotiation, both behind the bargaining table with one’s own client and across the table with the other side. They offer clear, candid advice about ways lawyers can search for beneficial trades, enlarge the scope of interests, improve communication, minimize transaction costs, and leave both sides better off than before. But lawyers cannot do the job alone. People who hire lawyers must help change the game from conflict to collaboration. The entrepreneur structuring a joint venture, the plaintiff embroiled in a civil suit, the CEO negotiating an employment contract, the real estate developer concerned with environmental hazards, the parent considering a custody battle—clients who understand the pressures and incentives a lawyer faces can work more effectively within the legal system to promote their own best interests. Attorneys exhausted by the trench warfare of cases that drag on for years will find here a positive, proven approach to revitalizing their profession.

Athenians performed democracy daily in their law courts. Without lawyers or judges, private citizens, acting as accusers and defendants, argued their own cases directly to juries composed typically of 201 to 501 jurors, who voted on a verdict without deliberation. This legal system strengthened and perpetuated democracy as Athenians understood it, for it emphasized the ideological equality of all (male) citizens and the hierarchy that placed them above women, children, and slaves.

This study uses Athenian court speeches to trace the consequences for both disputants and society of individuals' decisions to turn their quarrels into legal cases. Steven Johnstone describes the rhetorical strategies that prosecutors and defendants used to persuade juries and shows how these strategies reveal both the problems and the possibilities of language in the Athenian courts. He argues that Athenian "law" had no objective existence outside the courts and was, therefore, itself inherently rhetorical. This daring new interpretation advances an understanding of Athenian democracy that is not narrowly political, but rather links power to the practices of a particular institution.

For over seventy years, China has steadfastly asserted its sovereignty over the South China Sea, transforming these waters into a flashpoint of international tension and a focal point of global diplomacy. The Future of the South China Sea intricately explores China’s motivations, unveiling its ambitions in the South China Sea that are anything but static. Despite the prevailing narrative that frames China’s objectives as monolithic and unchanging, its underlying interests in the region have fluctuated in both content and urgency, driven by economic imperatives, historical legacies, domestic pressures, and broader international security concerns.

By incorporating negotiation records, such as the 1958 Declaration on China’s Territorial Sea, the 1992 ASEAN Declaration, and the 2005 Tripartite Agreement, Jiye Kim traces how China reshapes its interests into negotiation agendas, providing critical insights into the nation’s diplomacy and making a significant contribution to an existing literature on the South China Sea that has been largely dominated by analyses of great power rivalry. This book sheds light on China’s underlying interests as living and adaptable entities, providing scholars with a detailed, evidence-based understanding of the complexities that define one of the world’s most contested maritime regions.