UC Law SF Welcomes Professor Hiro Aragaki, the New Faculty Director of the Center for Negotiation and Dispute Resolution

Hiro Aragaki

Professor Hiro Aragaki

Aragaki is a specialist in alternative dispute resolution who is particularly interested in the intersection of contract law and civil procedure. He worked at Hastings as an adjunct professor nearly 20 years ago so, in his words, “the law school has always been a special place for me.” He was at Hastings when the Center for Negotiation and Dispute Resolution (CNDR) was launched and was pioneering courses in negotiation and mediation, which he said gave students an alternative to the adversarial model of lawyering and a new paradigm for thinking about conflict. Fast forward, and Aragaki is coming back to Hastings to serve as the Faculty Director of the CNDR.

He said, “I hope to continue the original and impactful work that CNDR has been doing, not just in terms of providing our students with top notch legal training and opportunities, but also in terms of engaging scholars, practitioners, legal reformers, and thought leaders, both in the Bay Area and beyond.”

In addition to his extensive writing on U.S. arbitration law, Aragaki has a special interest in studying how mediation is evolving internationally, through several long-term projects looking at mediation from comparative, law and development, and empirical perspectives.  He has frequently been called upon to train judges and lawyers in ADR and consult on ADR reform projects around the world, most recently as an Advisor to the judiciary of Kazakhstan and to the Supreme Court of India’s Expert Committee on Mediation.

Before coming to UC Law SF, Professor Aragaki was a tenured professor of law at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles and an Assistant Professor of Law & Ethics at Fordham University Graduate School of Business Administration in New York.  Prior to that, he was in legal practice for almost ten years.  Professor Aragaki is a member of the Roll of Solicitors in England & Wales, and a member of the State Bars of California, New York, and the District of Columbia. He also serves as an arbitrator and mediator at JAMS, and as a professorial research associate at SOAS School of Law in London.

His scholarship has won prestigious accolades and been published in top U.S. law journals, such as the N.Y.U. Law Review, the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, and the Yale Law Journal Online.