LAW 5090: Mediation Theory, Policy and Practice
Spring 2025 • Section 21 • CRN 55438

Course Description

In this class students will learn about mediation as both a site of legal practice and as a hope for a genuinely alternative approach to managing conflict and harm. Activists and lawmakers—motivated by a range of criticisms of the legal system—have brainstormed new processes and institutions to reform the legal system, bypass the current system, and suggest more relational, culturally appropriate, and relational ways of resolving disputes. However, the more mediation has become institutionalized the more people have also criticized the ways in which its theoretical principles, ethical implications, and practical consequences contradict (or sometimes instead mimic) legal norms and values. To make sense of mediation’s many promises and contradictions, we will examine how mediation became institutionalized in the civil justice system and the regulatory, legal, and ethical rules that now govern its use. We will also devote a substantial portion of this class to skills training, but from a critical perspective. That is, tudents will learn mediation skills at the same time and will critically analyze the visions of justice, peace, and efficiency that these skills embody. We will conclude the course by examining how some of mediation’s values, practices, and principles stand (or not) to reshape processes in the criminal legal system.

Book List/Materials