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With thanks for Peter Reilly (Texas A&M) for compiling this twice a year, listed below are our colleagues’ current scholarship projects:Gilat Juli Bachar (Temple Law)Against Overbroad Nondisclosures, 100 S. Cal. L. Rev. _ (forthcoming 2026/7):

  • This paper addresses the overlooked problem of overbroad settlement non-disclosure agreements (NDAs). Although confidentiality is regarded as a cornerstone of dispute resolution, sweeping NDAs can undermine one of settlement’s central objectives—helping parties achieve meaningful closure—by preventing individuals from discussing emotionally-taxing disputes even with therapists, clergy, or immediate family members. Drawing on doctrinal analysis and research in psychology, the paper demonstrates how such clauses may

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Continue Reading ADR Scholarship Projects (August 2026)

As many of you know via the list serv, Carrie Menkel-Meadow’s latest ADR text is out, Advanced Introduction to Alternative Dispute Resolution, and available for purchase.  Here’s are the key features of this book as listed on the book’s webpage:

  • Reviews the latest issues in multi-party, multi-issue international disputes
  • Outlines adjudication, arbitration, mediation, negotiation and various hybridized processes
  • Analyses critiques of alternative forms of dispute resolution as well as jurisprudential theories
  • Explores innovations in online dispute resolution, including the challenges and opportunities which arise from the use of artificial intelligence
  • Illustrates how innovative processes of facilitation and consensus building can

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Continue Reading Advanced Introduction to Alternative Dispute Resolution by Carrie Menkel-Meadow

Are you putting the finishing touches on your syllabi for the fall?  If you’re teaching mediation, interviewing, counseling, and negotiation, an ADR survey course, or a related subject, you might consider including a fun new teaching resource in your course.What Happened? A Mediation Story Featuring RPS Coach is a plausible story that students can read in about an hour.  As a software implementation goes seriously awry, two companies, their executives, their lawyers, and a mediator navigate legal uncertainty, business realities, organizational pressures, and strained relationships while trying to resolve a commercial dispute in 2025.  Students meet the principal characters…
Continue Reading Teaching Mediation This Fall?  Consider Starting with a Story

Earlier this week, the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit granted, in part, a broker-dealer’s request for review of the Securities and Exchange Commission’s denial of the firm’s petition for rulemaking related to FINRA arbitration. See Thrivent Financial for Lutherans v. Securities and Exchange Commission, __F. 4th __, 2026 WL 2095279 (D.C. Cir. July 21, 2026).  Though the opinion breaks little new ground with respect to administrative law, the court’s dicta with respect to the intersection of the Federal Arbitration Act, FINRA arbitration, and the federal securities laws caught my attention.In the case, the bylaws of Thrivent, a registered…
Continue Reading D.C. Circuit and Securities Arbitration

Some faculty are wary of using artificial intelligence (AI) in scholarship and teaching.  Some are reluctant to use it because they worry that it may undermine thinking, writing, and teaching.  Others worry about using AI in ways that effectively delegate too much intellectual work to the technology.There is another possibility.  You can use AI as part of a “centaur system.”  In centaur mode, humans use AI to get results that are better than humans or AI tools can produce operating independently.  Unfortunately, some people use it in “zombie” mode, deferring to outputs uncritically, contributing little independent judgment, and failing…
Continue Reading How You Can Take Advantage of AI in Your Scholarship and Teaching

I just finished writing a short story, What Happened? A Mediation Story Featuring RPS Coach, and I bet you would enjoy spending an hour to read it.
What Happened? tells the story of a promising business relationship that gradually unravels into a serious commercial dispute.  As the implementation of a software system goes seriously awry, two companies, their executives, their lawyers, and a mediator must navigate legal uncertainty, business realities, organizational pressures, and strained relationships.  Rather than focusing only on the mediation session, the story follows the participants from the origins of the conflict through preparation, the mediation session,…
Continue Reading Would You Like to Take an Hour to Read an Engaging Short Story about Mediation?

A bit of exciting news from Santa Clara Law: our conflict resolution program is becoming the Daley Center for Conflict Resolution, thanks to a $5 million gift from alumna Dorian Daley that will endow the Center. For those of us who have been building the program since its founding in 2017, this is an especially meaningful milestone because the endowment gives us the resources to invest in students, scholarship, conferences, and new initiatives for years to come. We’re excited about what this will make possible and deeply grateful for Dorian’s support. If you’re interested, here’s the university’s announcement.
Continue Reading Exciting News from Santa Clara Law Dispute Resolution Program

The Center for Negotiation and Dispute Resolution at the University of California College of Law, San Francisco (formerly UC Hastings) has launched a new Survey on Commercial Mediation in the U.S.  The Survey has the support of AAA/ICDR, CPR Institute and DRS, and JAMS.  A link to the survey instrument can be found below.
Commercial mediation now resolves billions of dollars in business disputes every year, yet remarkably little is known about how sophisticated users actually experience the process. This is one of the first large-scale efforts to examine commercial mediation across the United States through the perspective of parties,…
Continue Reading Please Fill Out UC Law SF’s Survey on Commercial Mediation

I’d love your help.
Mediate.com created a terrific new webpage for RPS Coach, with information about its core values, suggestions for getting the best results, descriptions of the topics it covers, and links to the publications incorporated into the tool.  Take a look at the homepage.

Now I’d like to add a Testimonials page.
Many people have told me they find RPS Coach useful in their work, but I’ve never systematically collected those reactions.  If you have used it, I would love to get a few sentences from you describing how you used it and how it helped.
You…
Continue Reading Have You Used RPS Coach?  I’d Love Your Testimonials and Feedback – by Friday, June 26

I’m delighted to post the new call for applications for this terrific program!  Apply now!!
AALS SECTION ON ALTERNATIVE DISPUTE RESOLUTIONCALL FOR APPLICATIONS2026-2027 NEW VOICES IN DISPUTE RESOLUTION PROGRAM
The AALS Section on Alternative Dispute Resolution announces the call for applications for the 2026-2027 mentorship program entitled “New Voices in Dispute Resolution.”
New Voices in Dispute Resolution is a year-long mentorship program in which junior scholars will be paired with senior mentors in the field for the purposes of obtaining feedback on their current scholarship. During the fall semester, the mentor will be available to discuss one academic project related…
Continue Reading New Voices in Dispute Resolution–Call for Applications!!

Many dispute resolution practitioners would answer that question with a simple “no.”
Until recently, I would have answered the question the same way.
When I thought about online dispute resolution (ODR), I thought about specialized online platforms like eBay.  ODR seemed like a distinct corner of the dispute resolution field that was completely disconnected from my own work.
In researching a profile of Colin Rule, I read his 2016 article, Is ODR ADR?: A Response to Carrie Menkel-Meadow.  He wrote that ODR is “the use of information and communications technologies to help parties resolve their disputes.”  He said…
Continue Reading Do You Know That You Use ODR?

Just over 40 years ago, Owen Fiss wrote his famous article Against Settlement, arguing that settlement was bad public policy.  While the article has long served as a foil for dispute resolution academics, it is a good read — especially if you disagree with it, as do some of the commenters in the first volume of Discussions in Dispute Resolution: The Foundational Articles.  The article also spawned a number of law review articles adopting the “against something” format, my favorite of which is likely Michael Moffitt’s Three Things to Be Against (“Settlement” Not Included).
Fiss’s article came…
Continue Reading Fiss Was Right – At Least About This One

If you want to learn how you can benefit from RPS Coach, check out the new Mediate.com webpage.
RPS Coach is a free AI tool offered as a public service.  It is designed to help mediators, attorneys, parties, educators, students, trainees, and ADR program administrators prepare for and participate in negotiation and mediation.  It reflects Real Practice Systems (RPS) Theory and emphasizes helping people make good decisions through careful preparation, realistic analysis, and thoughtful reflection.  RPS Theory provides a more detailed and accurate understanding of negotiation and mediation than traditional theories do.
The Mediate.com webpage explains how to get…
Continue Reading Mediate.com Hosts RPS Coach

Many people fear that artificial intelligence (AI) will undermine human skills, making them less capable of exercising independent judgment.  They worry that machines take control and humans lose control.
Sometimes that’s exactly what happens.
This problem, in my view, is not primarily that AI is too powerful.
The problem is that some people don’t recognize and exercise their power in deciding whether and how to use AI tools.  The key issue is how people manage the relationship between human judgment and AI capabilities.
Humans sometimes use AI passively – accepting outputs uncritically, contributing little independent thought, and surrendering responsibility for…
Continue Reading Are You Afraid of Becoming a Zombie If You Use AI?

You’re hallucinating if you think AI won’t hallucinate.
Reports of fake citations, fabricated quotations, manipulated images, and AI-generated misinformation now appear regularly.  Lawyers using generative AI have submitted fictitious cases in court filings and have been sanctioned.
These developments understandably alarm legal and dispute resolution professionals.  They should.
My article, The Surprising Value of AI Hallucinations, argues that the discussion about AI hallucinations may be missing something important:  hallucinations may produce unexpected benefits.
To be clear, I’m not suggesting that hallucinations are desirable.  They create serious risks, and the prevalence of hallucinations highlights the importance of careful verification.  Those…
Continue Reading Could AI Hallucinations Improve Professional Thinking?

I have known Colin Rule for more than twenty years.  During that time, I knew that he had done a lot of impressive things in ODR and that he’s a real mensch.
What I didn’t appreciate until recently was the extraordinary breadth of his work, the depth of his thinking, and how much he has helped shape modern dispute resolution.
That changed when Carli Conklin invited me to introduce Colin as the keynote speaker at Missouri’s great AI symposium last month.  Preparing those remarks sent me down a fascinating rabbit hole.  I read a small fraction of Colin’s many publications,…
Continue Reading I Knew Colin Rule Was Impressive.  But I Didn’t Know the Half of It.