The 2,000 year old Babylonian Talmud forms the basis for Jewish civil, criminal and religious law. Among its far-reaching principles is an unusual perspective on negotiation. Let me read from a short section on property law. Two persons appearing before a court are holding a garment. If one says it's all mine and the other says half of it is mine. Then the first will receive three-quarters and the latter one will receive one-quarter. This may seem counter intuitive. One person has claimed the whole garment or pie and the other has claimed half. Proportional division would propose a two to one split. Two thirds to first person and one third to the second. But the Talmud says the division should be three to one. Three quarters to the one asking for everything, and only one quarter to the one asking for half. This seems strange. And yet there's a simple logic underlying the solution. It's known and the Principle of the Divided Cloth, and it turns out to have broad application in negotiation. I'll explain how it works with an example. Imagine the two parties in the dispute Say Cain and Abel are holding on a cloth starting from different ends. Cain makes a claim starting from the left, he claims the entire pie or cloth for himself, conceding nothing to his brother Abel. Abel makes a claim to have the cloth starting from the right end, thereby conceding the other half to Cain. If we look at both claims together we see that the dispute is really only over half the cloth. Abel has conceded half to Cain. So that is not in dispute. The Talmud Solution is to give each party what has been conceded to him by the other and then split the amount in dispute. Thus Cain gets what Abel has conceded him, half the cloth plus half of the disputed half, so three-quarters in total. Cain conceded nothing to Abel so Abel only gets half the disputed amount which is half of half or a quarter. Now imagine instead that Cain isn't quite so greedy. He claims two thirds of the cloth conceding a third to Abel. Just as before Abel claims half the cloth and lets Cain have the other half. This time only a sixth of the cloth is in dispute. Following the Talmud's guidelines, Cain gets his half plus a twelfth. While Abel gets his third plus a twelfth. A simple solution, even if it's difficult to measure out. At this point I imagine you might be wondering. Why is Abel only asking for half the cloth? If Abel asked for more, he'd get more. Yes, this is true under both proportional division and the Principle of the Divided Cloth. We expect each party will try and make the largest claim he or she can justify. Cain's claim, may seem disproportionate, but perhaps you can make a good argument that he's bigger than Able, has more children, and thus needs more cloth. I think it helps to think of a negotiation as having two stages. One is making claims and the other is dividing things up once the claims are made. We'll talk about making claims in a later session. Here I focus on the dividing up question, because it helps illustrate the nature of the pie and it isn't as obvious as one might have imagine. It's also the case in some negotiations, the claims are really not negotiable. Consider the following example. Say someone owes money to two different creditors, $100 to one and $50 to the other. The problem is, he only has $100 to his name. In this case, the size of the debts is not in dispute. The relevant question is how the creditors should divide up his $100, given the two debts more than exhaust his assets. Before the session, you probably had one option in mind. Namely, proportional division. A $100 creditor will get twice as much as a $50 creditor, making the split 66-33. Now the Principle of the Divided Cloth gives you a second fair option. The $100 creditor gets the conceded 50 plus half of the 50 in dispute for a total of 75, leaving the other creditor with 25. At this point I don't expect you to be convinced one approach is more reasonable than the other. In the next sessions we'll explore some more examples. Right now, I want you to see there's another reasonable alternative to proportional division. The reason I like it is, not that it comes from the Talmud, the reason I like this approach Is that it coincides with the idea of splitting the pie.