Mr. Boies said the talks that went on past the date of the agreement with NBC Universal did not constitute negotiations.
Physical meetings, restricted both by their duration and intervals, constituted the negotiation space where inter-sector exchange of experiences took place and strategic decisions were made.
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and Randi Weingarten, the union's president, met for two hours on Thursday, with both sides saying that the meeting was a wide-ranging discussion on education and did not constitute formal negotiations.
Marriage negotiations constituted a key element in Elizabeth's foreign policy.
Now, experts in journalism ethics and others are raising questions about whether her comments — given that the deal may have been in negotiation — constituted a conflict of interest, and whether any journalist should endorse a commercial product.
And in an eloquent essay posted on the liberal Web site TalkingPointsMemo.com, the Brown University economics professor Glenn Loury argued that Obama's candidacy — especially his speech about race — constituted a kind of negotiation.
Scoblic objects: But if there is anything that has been discredited by history, it is the argument that every enemy is Hitler, that negotiations constitute appeasement, and that talking will automatically lead to a slaughter of Holocaust-like proportions.
The fact that this anti-Israeli and anti-Semitic indoctrination persists, despite the much-touted relaunch of Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations, constitutes a huge obstacle on the road to peace.
At that time, Ho felt that negotiations with the French constituted his best option because the Soviet Union had not yet endorsed the Vietminh or the Vietnamese nationalist party (VNQDD), and the French Communist Party chose to support French rule in Vietnam.
In the usual course of contractual niceties in the entertainment industry, Mr. Morgan and his representative could listen to what CNN had to say, but had to steer clear of anything that might constitute a formal negotiation.
