By Casey Aguinaga Amy Hearns is a senior litigation specialist for the private insurance company, Grange Insurance. She is also a licensed mediator for the company.
Q: Would you start off by describing your role at Grange Insurance? A: I am a licensed arbitrator and a licensed mediator, which is basically a “professional negotiator.” I also have my SCLA which stands for “Senior Claim Law Associate” and I work for an insurance company, so I do civil defense work. So if one of our clients is involved in an accident that causes damages and the dispute cannot be resolved without a lawsuit, then the case is reassigned to me and it is up to me to manage the defense. Q: How did you become interested in arbitration and mediation? A: The company that I work for is a relatively large insurance company, and they did not have any individuals working for the company that were arbitrators. It was a highly publicized position within the company in a catalog that details your name and your certification. Grange Insurance wanted several people from within the company to take the certification class and test to become licensed. Q: What is the difference between arbitration and mediation? A: When I am involved in a mediation, I work with an arbitrator, there are opening arguments, interruptions from either party are prohibited, and the parties are split up so that the mediator can come and get my opinion about the merits of a case. I tell them what I think the case has value at and why, and I show them the evidence that supports my opinion. However, my role as an arbitrator is much different. When I am hired as an arbitrator, it is because there is a civil dispute and both parties agree that they want a third party to settle it, being me. Then, my role is to analyze all of the evidence and make a decision. The decision I make is binding and thus ends the lawsuit, and both parties know this going in. The reason an arbitration is sometimes preferable is because a dispute can be resolved relatively quickly, whereas litigation can be expensive and time consuming. Q: Did you know when you were going through school that you wanted to work in the legal profession? A: Not initially. Grange Insurance created my current position, Litigation Specialist and they interviewed several lawyers as well as me. However, because I did not attend law school and they wanted me to fill that position, the company paid for me to get my Senior Claim Law Associate. Q: What does a typical day look like for you? A: Well, on days when I have a new lawsuit assigned to me, I will go over it and decide whether I think the dispute can be resolved relatively quickly. Then, I usually phone the opposing counsel and ask if they would like to revisit settlement negotiations. If they are not interested or if the dispute cannot be resolved with a phone call, I send the file to our company’s lawyers. They file the answer and the interrogatories file a request for documents. Once we have those we schedule a deposition, and once a lawsuit is filed it gives us an opportunity to look into the person’s medical history, which can very often be revealing. So, for example if our client hits somebody with their car and they claim that they have a neck injury and they need a substantial amount of money to alleviate their pain, and they have never had this injury before, we get authorizations through “discovery” which allows us to review their medical history. Typically, we go back ten years in someone’s medical history and sometimes we discover that yes, they have had this condition before. Once we have all this information the court will generally schedule a mediation, and I attend the mediation on behalf of our company. Both parties make their arguments, and then the mediator will separate the parties and try to work the case towards resolution. Q: How is what you do different than what the lawyers at Grange Insurance do? A: I evaluate the case based on its merits and assess whatever the interrogatories requests for documents reveals, and then it is my job to complete the evaluation and negotiate the case. Because I am not a lawyer I am not allowed to file pleadings, answers, or engage in motion practice. However, I am involved in all of the pre-trial meetings and hearings if a case is set to go to trial. Q: And finally, what would you suggest to students who are interested in a career in either mediation or arbitration? A: I would suggest that when looking for a job, find a company that is willing to further your education. Grange Insurance provided me with resources to become an expert at conflict resolution, and I have taken many classes to improve my skill. Along with this, there are many books out there that provide tips and training on how to work in environments where conversations about resolution may be difficult.
0 Comments
By Brittany Cardoza Religious freedom is a great point of pride in the United States of America. The first amendment to the Constitution, which guarantees the rights to some of the country’s most deeply cherished freedoms – freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly – states, “Congress shall make no law […] prohibiting the free exercise (of religion).” While this is a founding principle of the United States, freedom of religion has become a core value in many other democratic nations. However, many of these nations have found themselves in a difficult position as the rising influence of secularism butts heads with religious practices and beliefs. In the United States, debates have raged over religious freedom concerning the acceptance of LGBTQ+ rights and female contraception usage for a number of years. Court cases concerning issues of religious freedom have been met with mixed results. When the owner of a Colorado bakery refused service to two men attempting to buy a wedding cake in 2014, the state’s Civil Rights Commission ruled that the bakery had unlawfully discriminated against the couple. However, the Supreme Court ruling in the case of Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. in 2014 swung in the opposite direction, requiring a religious exemption for the Affordable Care Act’s contraception requirement. With these two opposing court decisions in mind, we must ask ourselves: at what point must the compelling interest of the governing body override religious ideology? Considering the current political climate as we approach the close of 2016, there are at least a dozen other examples of debates over the right to free exercise across the globe, but not many consider the implications for matters of animal welfare. However, the battle between animal welfare and religious freedom came to a head in the Netherlands in 2011 when the Party for the Animals (Partij voor de Dieren or PvdD) proposed a ban on all animal slaughter performed without stunning, arguing that this practice caused unnecessary suffering. This bill would remove the religious exemptions previously awarded to butcheries that produce kosher and halal meat using Jewish and Islamic methods of slaughter. The Party for the Animals is a testimonial party (a party that seeks to increase awareness of and legislation for certain issues rather than to gain political power) in the Netherlands. The PvdD advocates for legislation protecting animals and the environment. Although initially ridiculed by establishment parties at its foundation in 2002, the PvdD has received increasing support and now occupies seats in many branches of government, including the Dutch House of Parliament, the Dutch Senate, European Parliament, and multiple Provincial states. The PvdD created a scientific bureau called the Nicolaas G. Pierson Foundation for the purpose of studying a variety of animal welfare issues. The foundation’s investigations found that “ritual slaughter” performed in the Jewish and Islamic traditions, which require animals to be conscious at the time of slaughter, often caused unnecessary distress and suffering. Whether the practices are in fact inhumane is hotly contested by the Jewish and Muslim communities. The slaughtering practices of the two religions are similar and instruct specially trained butchers to kill each animal with one fatal slice across the neck with a surgically sharp knife. According to Dutch Chief Rabbi Benjamin Jacobs, this process causes blood pressure to drop so sharply that the animal suffers very little when done correctly. However, studies conducted at Massey University in New Zealand have found that animals experience great pain as a result of the nerves in the neck being cut, and continue to experience pain until death – even after losing consciousness. The research concludes that animals suffer even when the religious slaughtering methods are done competently, so one can only imagine the suffering that occurs when large scale slaughterhouses fail to execute the process correctly due to lack of training, quality of equipment, and emotional detachment that tends to occur in massive killing operations. A study commissioned by the Dutch government in 2008 revealed that these failures led to ineffective cuts that caused more initial pain and elongated the period of suffering, sometimes requiring “potentially painful manipulations,” such as a second cut, to finally end the animal’s life. The Dutch Party for the Animals used the Pierson Foundation's report to pursue legislation banning slaughtering practices deemed inhumane. The bill passed by a large margin in the Dutch Lower Court of the House of Parliament, though not in quite the way the PvdD would have hoped. The bill received enthusiastic support from the Freedom Party, a party that expresses anti-immigration and anti-Muslim positions, suggesting that the some members of the Dutch Parliament may have voted with the intention of burdening religious freedom rather than supporting animal welfare. The PvdD, however, stood by the bill as it moved into the Senate, where the matter was ultimately settled with a compromise accepted by both the Senate and representatives from the Jewish and Muslim communities. The compromise stated that the religious exemption would remain, allowing Jewish and Muslim butcheries to continue their slaughtering methods under new regulations intended to minimize suffering. The document mandates that all slaughters must take place in the presence of a veterinarian who shall step in and kill the animal if it has not died within 40 seconds of the throat slit. In addition, animals with body features that may put them at risk for an ineffective cut, such as a particularly thick neck, can and should be rejected by the veterinarians. This compromise seemed to please everyone but the PvdD, who still wield scientific research to support their assertion that ritual slaughter is inhumane even when done efficiently. The PvdD’s condemnation of religious exemptions to the stunning mandate brings up an important ideological issue: is stunning animals prior to slaughter truly a more humane practice? Can we genuinely claim that any slaughtering practice is humane? When defending the Jewish slaughtering process, by which kosher meat is procured, Jonathan Arkush of the Board of Deputies of British Jews brought up a perspective-changing statistic concerning the efficacy of stunning practices. According to Arkush, “Animal welfare organizations have shown that pre-stunning fails to stun in between 9% and 31% of cases […] When an animal is 'mis-stunned' it suffers enormous pain and distress.” He then goes on to explain that, even taking the most conservative estimate of 9%, the number of animals that experience the agony of mis-stunning exceeds the entire Kosher market by a factor of ten. The failure to stun properly, like the failure to effectively slit the throat, is a symptom of large-scale, industrialized killing operations. The industrialization of animal agriculture has lead to egregious violations of animal welfare, and undue suffering is experienced throughout the life cycle. While it is understandable that animal activists would fight any practice that causes suffering, the ban on religious slaughter is misguided. One of the main goals of the Party for the Animals is to bring about an end to factory farming, which is the goal they should be putting all their efforts towards – not a ban that singles out the behavior of specific religious groups. The freedom of religion is deeply ingrained in democratic ideology, making it impossible for a religious ban of this sort to succeed in western society without the prevalence of intolerant ideologies like those of the aforementioned Dutch Freedom Party. The Party for the Animals has proposed many other bills that would regulate all factory farming operations and provide significant improvements for animal welfare, and though these bills have not yet gained enough support to be implemented, they are the vehicle by which animal rights will eventually succeed. Works Cited
|
Archives
March 2018
Categories |