Roger Fisher

Roger Dummer Fisher was born on May 28, 1922, in Winnetka, Illinois, to Walter Taylor Fisher, a prominent Chicago lawyer, and Katharine Dummer Fisher. He grew up with four brothers and sister.

After serving in World War II as a weather reconnaissance pilot, Fisher graduated from Harvard with an A.B. in Government in 1943. In 1948, he graduated from Harvard Law School with an LL.B.. That same year, Fisher married Caroline (Carrie) Speer and moved to Paris where he worked on the Marshall Plan in Paris under W. Averell Harriman from until 1949.

After returning to the US, Fisher worked for the Washington D.C. law firm Covington & Burling from 1950-1956, with most of his work dealing with international issues. From 1956-1958 he served as an assistant to the Solicitor General in the Department of Justice. In 1957, Fisher argued for the United States in Roth v. United States, a landmark obscenity case, and won.

In 1958, Fisher returned to Harvard Law School as a lecturer on law, becoming a full professor of law in 1960. He soon found his calling in international law and negotiations. In 1976, he achieved tenure becaming the Samuel Williston Professor of Law.

In 1969, Fisher proposed the Peabody Award-winning television program The Advocates. The program focused on “stimulating public participation, and understanding, by focusing on realistic choices that must be made in the future, by having both sides of the question presented, and by demonstrating the interest that public officials have in both reasoned arguments and the views of their constituents.” Fisher was Executive Producer from 1969 to 1974 and then again bi-weekly from January 26, 1978 through September 9, 1979. In 1975 Fisher also worked on the WGBH documentary series Arabs & Israelis. His work on both of these programs was a manifestation of his interest in using television as a medium for communicating information about the law and current events to the public.

In 1979, Fisher co-founded the Harvard Negotiation Project (HNP) in 1979 with William Ury and Bruce Patton, serving at the director. HNP's mission is “to improve the theory and practice of conflict resolution and negotiation by working on real world conflict intervention, theory building, education and training, and writing and disseminating new ideas.”

In addition to his work at Harvard and as an author of numerous books, Fisher was a highly sought-after consultant in international negotiations from the 1960s to the 1980s. In 1981, Roger Fisher and William Ury published the bestselling book Getting to YES: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In , a seminal book in interest-based negotiation. In 1984 Fisher founded the consulting firm Conflict Management Group and with Howard Raiff and William Ury founded Conflict Management Inc. also in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Through these firms, Fisher was able to conduct negotiations and train negotiators around the world, including different South African government parties during the Apartheid.

In 1992, Fisher became the Samuel Williston Professor of Law, fully retiring in 2002.

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These are only some of Fisher's numerous publications