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A scoping paper exploring the issues involved in the application of a number of technologies to the legal service sector in the UK, with a particular focus on the implications for the sector itself.

Time and time again, the Department of Defense, the Executive Branch, and other government officials have claimed publicly that Guantanamo Bay detainees who have been released have “returned to the battlefield” where they have then been re-captured or killed. On January 13, 2009, during a press conference the Department of Defense provided its 43rd attempt to report on the number of detainees released from Guantanamo who returned to the battlefield. This latest report alleges that 61 detainees have returned to the battlefield. This report seeks to examine the last numbers.

The defining characteristic of an “urban legend” is its ability to perpetuate itself not only without factual support but also in the face of overwhelming factual evidence to the contrary. While it is unsurprising to find urban legends kept alive in the unmoderated precincts of the internet, it is shocking to discover one depicted as truth in an opinion written by a United States Supreme Court Justice.Just this month, however, Justice Antonin Scalia, in his dissent in Boumediene v. Bush, repeated the persistent yet false accusation that “[a]t least 30 of those prisoners hitherto released from Guantanamo Bay have returned to the battlefield.” His source for this misinformation was a year-old Senate Minority Report, which in turn was based on misinformation provided by the Department of Defense.Justice Scalia’s reliance upon the these sources would be more justifiable had this urban legend not (one would have thought) been permanently interred by later developments, including a Department of Defense press release issued in 2007, as well as hearings held before the House Foreign Relations Committee less than two weeks before Justice Scalia’s dissent was released.On December 10, 2007, the Seton Hall Center for Policy and Research issued a report entitled The Meaning of “Battlefield”: An Analysis of the Government’s Representations of “Battlefield Capture” and “Recidivism” of the Guantanamo Detainees, demonstrating that statements asserting that thirty former detainees had returned to the battlefield were inaccurate. Further developments, including recent hearings before Congress at which more information was provided by the Department of Defense, confirm that the claim there have been thirty recidivists is simply wrong and has no place in a reasoned public debate about Guantanamo.

This article examines the triple-interact, a cue-response-cue-response sequence that plays an important role in organizing negotiators’ behavior. Drawing on theories of interpersonal orientation and framing, we propose four types of triple-interact and make predictions about the relative occurrence and behavioral content of each type. We test these predictions by analyzing the conditional probabilities among behaviors in 29 conflict negotiations. Results show consistent use of the four types of triple-interact irrespective of time period and negotiation outcome. In order of decreasing frequency, negotiators used triple-interacts that reciprocated the current position, reoriented between cooperative and competitive positions, reframed perceptions of the current position, and restructured the interaction onto a new issue. However, the content of triple-interacts differed over time and outcome. In comparison to unsuccessful negotiations, successful negotiations involved triple-interacts that were more likely to end with integrative behavior and, during the second half of interaction, more likely to focus on substantive rather than relational issues.

This research examines cultural differences in negotiators' responses to rational persuasion in crisis negotiations over time. Using a new method of examining cue-response patterns, we examined 25 crisis negotiations in which police negotiators interacted with perpetrators from low- or high-context cultures. As predicted, low-context more than high-context perpetrators were found to use persuasive arguments, to reciprocate persuasive arguments, and to respond to persuasive arguments in a compromising way. These effects were partly mediated by time period, with the more normative, later period of interaction associated with larger cultural effects than the early crisis-dominated period of interaction. Further analyses found that low-context perpetrators were more likely to communicate threats, but that high-context negotiators were more likely to reciprocate them. The implications of these findings for our understanding of inter-cultural interaction are discussed.

There remains a discrepancy between experimental conceptualizations of reciprocity and evidence of reciprocity in real-world negotiation interactions. This paper outlines these discrepancies and proposes a general model of reciprocity that gives a single account of the discrepancies found in research findings. Drawing on social interactionist theory and social identity theory, the model proposes that an individual's decision to reciprocate is governed by a contextual appraisal consisting of three strands: individual's attitudinal response to the situation, their evaluation of the other's likely objectives, and the situational constraints in which they find themselves. The strands constitute an individual's internal response to the situation, which combine to form their overall intention to and subsequent action to reciprocate or otherwise. The various components of the model, and the relationships among these components, is supported with research from a range of negotiation settings.

A central assumption of conflict negotiation research is that organized sequences of behavior underlie the trends and dimensions found to structure interaction. We empirically test this assumption using a new "proximity" coefficient, which measures the global interrelationships among behaviors based on their intrinsic local organization within an interaction sequence. An analysis of sequences from 21 conflict negotiations showed that local cue-response dependencies are organized in a way that corresponds with an established structural model of communication (Taylor, 2002). Further analysis of case-specific coefficients showed that criminal, political and domestic incidents involve very different cue-response dynamics, with criminal incidents dividing into two distinct types of interaction. The importance of the proximity concept for unifying local and global accounts of negotiation behavior, and the avenues of research made possible by the proximity coefficient, are discussed.