The most high-profile negotiation of the past 50 years was that culminating in the Paris Peace Accords of 1973. The accords supposedly ended the Vietnam War. This year marks the 40th anniversary of the accords. Though the accords yielded two Nobel Peace Prizes, we hear almost nothing about them today.
To compare the negotiations at Paris to the garden-variety negotiations which make up so much of a civilian lawyer’s daily practice today seems a stretch. And yet the lessons of the Paris Peace Accords are timeless and true today, no matter what the stakes in our own cases. This is my humble take on four of them.
