ADR Speaker Series 2024
ADR Speaker Series – Spring 2024
Join the Center for Negotiation and Dispute Resolution (CNDR) at UC Law San Francisco for a public talk series on a variety of dispute resolution topics.
The Spring 2024 ADR Speaker Series will include six influential thought leaders presenting new ideas and cutting edge research to members of the UC Law SF community and the general public. The ADR Speaker Series is held in conjunction with an Advanced ADR Colloquium course for students, taught in 2024 by CNDR Professor Clark Freshman.
Talks will be held from 12:30pm to 1:30pm (PST) on selected Mondays from January 29 to March 25, 2024 as scheduled below. Lunch will be provided for the in-person events.
One hour of California MCLE credit per event is available for a processing fee, and participants may attend via Zoom. Register separately for each event on the registration page.
To see all upcoming CNDR events by date click here.
Moderator
Clark Freshman, Professor of Law, Center for Negotiation and Dispute Resolution (CNDR), UC Law San Francisco
Schedule of Speakers
Monday, January 29, 2024 from 12:30-1:30pm (PT)
Managing Conflict Mindfully: Don’t Believe Everything You Think
Leonard Riskin, Harris H. Agnew Visiting Professor of Dispute Resolution, Northwestern Pritzker School of Law
Zoom only
Monday, February 5 from 12:30-1:30pm (PT)
Bespoke Dispute Resolution Ethics? The Case of Superfund Neutral Allocators
Michael Moffitt, Philip H. Knight Chair in Law at the University of Oregon
In-person and via Zoom
February 20, 2024 from 12:30-1:30pm (PT)
Emotional Efficiency: An Empirical Study of How Small Boosts Improve Negotiation Outcomes For Ordinary People
Clark Freshman, Professor of Law, UC Law San Francisco
In-person and via Zoom
February 26, 2024, from 12:30-1:30pm (PT)
We Need to Talk: Modernizing Attorney-Client Jail Communications
Cynthia Alkon, Professor of Law and Director of the Criminal Law, Justice & Policy Program at Texas A&M University School of Law
In-person and via Zoom
March 18, 2024 from 12:30 – 1:30pm (PT)
Arbitration’s Unraveling
Myriam Gilles, Paul R. Verkuil Chair in Public Law, Cardozo Law School
Zoom only
Monday, March 26, 2024 from 12:30 – 1:30pm (PT)
Deadline Negotiations
Hal Abramson, Professor of Law, Touro University School of Law, New York
In-person and via Zoom
Leonard Riskin
Leonard L. Riskin is a visiting professor at Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law, distinguished senior fellow at its Center on Negotiation, Mediation, and Restorative Justice, and Chesterfield Smith Professor Emeritus at the University of Florida Levin College of Law. He previously served as Director of the Center for the Study of Dispute Resolution and Isidor Loeb Professor of Law at the University of Missouri-Columbia. Len practices, teaches, and writes about mediation, negotiation, and alternative dispute resolution and created the globally-influential “grid” of mediator orientations. He led a major project to integrate dispute resolution into standard law school classes at the University of Missouri School of Law and five other law schools. He also leads efforts to integrate mindfulness and internal family systems into the education of lawyers and other dispute resolution professionals. Len has published several books, numerous articles in scholarly journals, and essays in popular publications including the New York Times Magazine and The Atlantic. He has led training workshops around the world, and has won numerous awards including the Award for Outstanding Scholarship from the ABA Section of Dispute Resolution, the Cloke-Millen Peacemaker Award, and teaching awards at Northwestern Law. Prior to teaching in law schools, Len served as a lawyer with the U.S. Department of Justice and as general counsel of the National Alliance of Businessmen, both in Washington, D.C. His most recent book is Managing Conflict Mindfully: Don’t Believe Everything You Think (2023).
Michael Moffitt
Michael Moffitt holds the Philip H. Knight Chair in Law at the University of Oregon, where he also teaches as faculty-in-residence at the Clark Honors College. Immediately after law school, he served as law clerk to United States District Judge Ann Aldrich. Professor Moffitt also spent several years as a consultant with Conflict Management Group, engaged in consulting and mediation services around the world. Professor Moffitt previously served for six years as the Dean of the Law School at Oregon and for two years as the Roger D. Fisher Visiting Professor at Harvard Law School, where he led the Negotiation Workshops and taught courses on dispute resolution.
Professor Moffitt research focuses on dispute resolution in its various forms. He has written more than two dozen books and scholarly articles. He has won the scholarly article of the year from both the AALS Section on Dispute Resolution and from the AALS Section on Professional Responsibility. He has also won the University of Oregon’s Ersted Award for Distinguished Teaching and Hermann Award for Specialized Pedagogy. A graduate of Marietta College and Harvard Law School, Moffitt is a devoted but mediocre snowboarder, an aggressive tennis player, and a slow but persistent hiker.
Clark Freshman
Professor Clark Freshman, a tenured professor of law at the University of California in San Francisco, is the world’s most sought-after speaker on lie detection, emotion, and nonverbal communication for negotiators. He collaborated in 2004 with Paul Ekman (inspiration for TV’s Lie to Me) to create a science-based interviewing program for TSA at airports. That collaboration also addressed reducing potential bias.
Clark’s publications on bias, bias reduction, negotiation, and lie detection, and mindfulness appear in law journals at Harvard, Stanford, Columbia, Cornell and elsewhere. He has been an invited speaker at Harvard Business School, Columbia Business School, Harvard Law School, Stanford Law School, and elsewhere. His speaking and training engagements include leading law firms, such as DLA Piper, Latham and Watkins, Wilmer Hale. Other engagements include Genentech account executives, Merrill Lynch Financial Advisors, the California Judges Association, federal administrative law judges, and investment relations professionals. He works with BiasSync to provide online and in person strategies for mitigation of implicit bias.
Cynthia Alkon
Professor Cynthia Alkon is a law professor and the Director of the Criminal Law, Justice & Policy Program at Texas A&M University School of Law. Professor Alkon teaches Criminal Law, Advanced Criminal Procedure, and Negotiation. Professor Alkon’s scholarship focuses on plea bargaining, criminal dispute resolution, comparative criminal procedure and rule of law reform. Before joining academia, Professor Alkon was a deputy public defender in Los Angeles County handling cases ranging from misdemeanors to first degree murder. Professor Alkon then joined the American Bar Association Central and East European Law Initiative working as a Rule of Law Liaison in Belarus for two years (1998-2000). After Belarus Professor Alkon was the head of the legal department for the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) in Albania. From 2002-2006 Professor Alkon was the Head of the Rule of Law Unit for the OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (OSCE/ODIHR). In that position Professor Alkon supervised the OSCE/ODIHR Rule of Law Unit’s criminal justice reform assistance projects in Central Asia, the Caucasus and Eastern Europe.
Professor Alkon earned an LL.M in Dispute Resolution from the University of Missouri-Columbia, a J.D. from the University of California, Hastings College of the Law (now UC Law San Francisco), and a B.A. in International Relations from San Francisco State University. Professor Alkon was admitted to the California Bar in 1990 (currently inactive) and the District of Columbia Bar in 1991.
Myriam Gilles
Myriam Gilles is a graduate of Harvard-Radcliffe College and Yale Law School who specializes
in class actions and aggregate litigation, and has written extensively on forced arbitration
clauses. She has testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee (2013, 2017, 2019) and the
House Judiciary Committee (2019 and 2020) on the impact of forced arbitration and class
action bans, and before the Vermont Assembly (2017) and the Oregon Legislature (2018) on
state law efforts to blunt the effect of these provisions. Professor Gilles also writes on civil
rights and structural reform litigation, medical malpractice, access to justice and tort law. Her
scholarly articles have appeared in the nation’s top law reviews, including Berkeley, Chicago,
Columbia, Michigan, Penn, Texas, and Yale, and her work has been cited in numerous judicial
decisions. She is the 5th most cited civil procedure scholar in the country, and an editor of an
influential casebook in the field, Babcock, Massaro, Spaulding and Gilles, Civil Procedure:
Cases and Problems (Wolters Kluwer, 7th ed.).
Hal Abramson
Professor Hal Abramson, Touro University Law Center, New York, has been deeply involved in the development and practice of domestic and international dispute resolution for more than twenty-five years. He contributes as a teacher, trainer, author, and participant on professional committees and serves actively as a mediator and facilitator. He also has taught or trained on dispute resolution in twenty-two countries on six continents (19 in-person, 3 on Zoom). He is an award-winning author with three of his publications receiving awards from the CPR International Institute for Conflict Resolution. In 2020, he was the sole recipient of Touro University’s Presidential Award for Scholarship.
Professor Abramson has been selected for the International Who’s Who of Commercial Mediation since its inaugural year and served as the first Scholar-in-Residence for the International Academy of Mediators. He chaired the committee that drafted the rules for the ABA Mediation Representation Competition, served on the inaugural committee that launched the ICC Mediation Competition in Paris, and Chaired the Task Force for IMI that drafted the first ever standards for certifying cross-cultural mediators. He also was involved with drafting the new UN Singapore Mediation Convention including serving as an expert advisor to UNCITRAL and co-chairing the first symposium on the Convention.
While at Touro, he served as vice dean for nine years including as acting dean twice and taught a wide range of dispute resolution and business courses including currently first year contracts. He also has visited full-time at Cardozo Law School in NYC, UNLV Law School in Las Vegas, and the U.S. Air Force Academy where he helped build its negotiation program.
Past Speakers and Sessions
2023 ADR Speaker Series
Moderator
Professor Hiro Aragaki, Professor of Law and Director of the Center for Negotiation and Dispute Resolution (CNDR)
Speakers
January 24, 2023: Robert Mnookin, Bargaining with the Devil… To End Putin’s War
January 31, 2023: Catherine Rogers, Reconceptualizing the Party-Appointed Arbitrator and the Meaning of Impartiality
February 14, 2023: Elizabeth Chan, The Enforcement of Metaverse-Related Disputes that are Resolved in International Arbitration
March 14, 2023: Ellen Deason, Can Mediators Promote Anti-Racism Within the Confines of Neutrality?
March 21, 2023: Nancy Welsh, Lawyers’ Client-Inclusive Negotiations: The “New Mediation”?
April 11, 2023: Janet Martinez and Colin Rule, The Future is Digital: Online Dispute Resolution and Decentralized Justice
April 18, 2023: Bruce Edwards, Mediation Begins with Me: A Look at Self Reflection, Self Management and Self Compassion
Recordings are available here on our YouTube channel: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPOX7LKP7DNV4MLwJFo3ZG3ZnCTbc5W2x&si=dYOU2yzn0XDCjLV-
If a recording is not uploaded, the speaker did not give consent to share a recording of their presentation or there was an issues with the recording quality.