In a way, the Obama presidency is the biggest test that the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School has ever faced. The program, founded in 1983, has long been a leading source of research on which negotiation methods — and which mediation and arbitration methods — are most effective, and which backfire. It offers courses to law school students and to the general public and frequently lends its services to companies and governments mired in intractable situations.

And perhaps its most famous former student is 1991 law school graduate Barack Obama, who was the head of the student mediation board.

“If we ever had a president who has learned the science of game theory and the practice of problem-solving negotiation, it was Obama,” Carrie Menkel-Meadow, a negotiation expert at the University of California at Irvine School of Law, told me.

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