As you may have heard, Dwight Golann will receive the ABA Section of Dispute Resolution’s scholarship award this year.

This has prompted a chorus of congratulations, and I join in the accolades for his work.

For many reasons.  Here are some of them.

He continues to practice mediation and his mediations clearly inform his work.  His ideas are realistic and pragmatic, helping us move toward more sophisticated understandings.  Several recent examples describe common patterns of loss and grief, mediators’ subtle expressions that don’t neatly fit into the traditional facilitative-evaluative typology, and a study about when lawyers and litigants choose to mediate.

He often partners with Marjorie Aaron, and we have benefitted from the synergy of their work.

He has worked to improve our skills teaching, producing a great library of videos and “classes-in-a-box.”  He has worked to help adjunct faculty, who do a substantial portion of ADR teaching and are likely to do an even larger share as a substantial cohort of us will retire in the foreseeable future.

He wrote this listserv post about our community:

I once thought of communities as immutable institutions.  I now know, though, that they exist only if people start, grow and continue to care for them.  We have built such a community for teachers of ADR, and we maintain it through the people who support our conferences, awards and activities.  Their efforts reflect what we care about – gaining knowledge and conveying it to our students.  Perhaps professors in other fields would have responded the same way, but I have a sense that we express the values we teach in the way we care for each other.

Dwight is part of what makes our community so special.

And he’s just a generally good guy.

What do you think?  Would you like to write a comment?