Professor Janet Martinez Delivers OSU Schwartz Lecture on Dispute Resolution
The Center for Negotiation and Dispute Resolution (CNDR) congratulates UC Law San Francisco Adjunct Professor Janet Martinez on her selection to deliver the 2024 Schwartz Lecture on Dispute Resolution!
Janet Martinez
A longtime professor and recent former Director of Stanford Law School’s Martin Daniel Gould Center for Conflict Resolution, Professor Martinez is known as an expert on Dispute System Design, and recently co-taught Online Dispute Resolution at UC Law SF with Colin Rule.
Established in 1992 at The Ohio State University Moritz College of Law (OSU), the lecture is published in the interdisciplinary Ohio State Journal on Dispute Resolution. On March 20, 2024 Professor Martinez delivered her talk titled System Design for Contemporary Justice.
In the lecture, Professor Martinez discussed the applicability of dispute system design across different contexts–public, private, and international–and the growing importance of dispute resolution in legal practice as evidenced by its inclusion on the NextGen Bar Exam in 2026.
She outlined key considerations in designing a dispute system, such as goals, stakeholders, processes, culture/context, resources and evaluation. Using the experience of San Francisco as an example, Martinez described the work of the City & County of San Francisco’s task force to identify and quantify harms experienced in the last century by its African American residents to warrant reparations in the form of cash awards as well as hundreds of concrete public policy recommendations to remediate those harms.
Professor Martinez closed by asking us to consider the implications of fast changing technology in our dispute systems, and how we can integrate those innovations to enhance conflict prevention, management, and resolution.