Professor Clark Freshman Presents LGBTQ Equality Project at Works-In-Progress Conference

Center for Negotiation and Dispute Resolution (CNDR) Professor Clark Freshman presented a part of his larger project on Re-Negotiating LGBTQ Equality in an Age of Counter-Reformation at the 2023 AALS ADR Works-in-Progress Conference (WIP) in October 2023. Quinnipiac University School of Law and Yale Law School co-hosted this year’s conference. Since 2007, the WIP has brought together dispute resolution scholars and researchers to share their ideas and discuss their work in a rigorous and collegial atmosphere.

Professor Freshman’s paper focused on how and why ADR scholarship, teaching, and practices (for example, relating to definitions of diversity among ADR providers) overlook bias involving LGBTQ parties, such as the way banks charge same-sex couples higher mortgage rates.

His larger project seeks to foster collaboration among both ADR scholars and scholars of LGBTQ inclusion. For example, what can negotiation scholarship teach those seeking to re-negotiate LGBTQ equality against calls for the right to discriminate under so-called “religious freedom?” Conversely, what can ADR scholars learn from successful efforts at LGBTQ equality, such as partnering with the Mormon church in Utah to get civil rights protection? In a twist on other implicit bias studies and a novel use of lawyer negotiations in MCLE, the narrow project involves an empirical study to examine how lawyers may negotiate differently when they believe parties are, or are not, LGBTQ.

Professor Freshman also presented the  paper at CNDR’s recent 20th Anniversary Conference, “DEI and Dispute Resolution: Reimagining the Field.” In light of the surge in anti-Semitism, the paper also addressed anti-Semitism.