Hiro Aragaki

Bio

Hiro Aragaki joined the UC Law SF faculty in 2022 as Professor of Law and Director of the Center for Negotiation and Dispute Resolution.  His scholarly interests cluster around the intersection of contract and procedure, and his work on ADR has 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.  It has also won prestigious accolades, including being selected for the Stanford/Yale Junior Faculty Forum (2011), Honorable Mention in the AALS Scholarly Papers Competition (2013), and being selected for presentation at the Branstetter New Voices Workshop at Vanderbilt Law School (2014).

Professor Aragaki has written extensively on federal arbitration law and is currently engaged in a number of long-term projects looking at mediation from comparative, 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 Expert Committee on Mediation, Supreme Court of India, and as an advisor to the judiciary of Kazakhstan on arbitration law reforms.

Before coming to Hastings, Professor Aragaki was a Professor of Law at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles. Prior to that, he was an Assistant Professor of Law & Ethics at Fordham University Graduate School of Business Administration in New York, where he taught courses on business law. Before teaching in higher education, he practiced law at global law firms and clerked for the Hon. Fern M. Smith, U.S. District Court (N.D. Cal.).

Professor Aragaki is a former member of the California State Bar Standing Committee on Alternative Dispute Resolution, a former member of the AALS Section on Dispute Resolution Executive Committee, and a former Board member of the California Dispute Resolution Council. He currently holds leadership positions in the ABA Section on International Law and ABA ROLI, and is a Professorial Research Associate at SOAS School of Law in London. He serves as an arbitrator and mediator at JAMS, and is admitted to practice in California, New York, the District of Columbia, and England & Wales.

Education

• Yale University
  BA, magna cum laude

• University of Cambridge
  MPhil, PhD

• Stanford Law School
  JD, with distinction

Selected Scholarship

• Civil Justice Reform in Chinese Law and Society (forthcoming)
  __ Asian Journal of Law & Society __ 2022

• A Snapshot of National Legislation on Same Neutral Med-Arb and Arb-Med Around the Globe
  Multi-Tier Approaches to the Resolution of International Disputes: A Global and Comparative Study, Anselmo Reyes & Weixia Gu, eds. 2022

• The Critical Theory Legacy of Jean Sternlight’s Panacea or Corporate Tool?
  Discussions in Dispute Resolution: The Foundational Articles 2021

• The Metaphysics of Arbitration: A Reply to Hensler & Khatam
  18 Nev. L.J. 541 2018

• Arbitration Reform in India: Challenges and Opportunities
  The Developing World of Arbitration: A Comparative Study of Arbitration Reform in the Asia Pacific (Weixia Gu & Anselmo Reyes, eds.) 2018

• Arbitration: Creature of Contract, Pillar of Procedure
  8 Penn St. Y.B. Arb. & Mediation 2 2016

• Constructions of Arbitration’s Informalism: Autonomy, Efficiency, and Justice
  2016 J. Disp. Resol. 141 2016

• Does Rigorously Enforcing Arbitration Agreements Promote “Autonomy”?
  91 Ind. L.J. 1143 2016

• The Federal Arbitration Act as Procedural Reform
  89 N.Y.U. L. Rev. 1939 2014

• AT&T Mobility v. Concepcion and the Antidiscrimination Theory of Federal Arbitration Act Preemption
  4 Penn St. B. Arb. & Mediation 39 2013

• Arbitration’s Suspect Status
  159 U. Pa. L. Rev. 1233 2011

• Equal Opportunity for Arbitration
  58 UCLA L. Rev. 1189 2011

• The Mess of Manifest Disregard
  119 Yale L.J. Online 1 2009

• Deliberative Democracy as Dispute Resolution? Conflict, Interests, and Reasons
  24 Ohio St. J. on Disp. Resol. 406 2009