Aha? Is Creativity Possible in Legal Problem Solving and Teachable in Legal Education?

This article continues and expands on my earlier project of seeking to describe how legal negotiation should be understood conceptually and undertaken behaviorally to produce better solutions to legal problems. As structured problem solving requires interests, needs and objectives identification, so too must creative solution seeking have its structure and elements in order to be effectively taught. Because research and teaching about creativity and how we think has expanded greatly since modern legal negotiation theory has been developed, it is now especially appropriate to examine how we might harness this new learning to how we might examine and teach legal creativity in the context of legal negotiation and problem solving. This article explores both the cognitive and behavioral dimensions of legal creativity and offers suggestions for how it can be taught more effectively in legal education, both within the more narrow curricula of negotiation courses and more generally throughout legal education