ADR Speaker Series - Fall 2025
ADR Speaker Series – Fall 2025
Join the Center for Negotiation and Dispute Resolution (CNDR) at UC Law San Francisco for a public talk series on a variety of dispute resolution topics.
The Fall 2025 ADR Speaker Series will include six influential thought leaders presenting new ideas and cutting edge research to members of the UC Law SF community and the general public. The ADR Speaker Series is held in conjunction with an Advanced ADR Colloquium course for students, taught in Fall 2025 by CNDR Professor Clark Freshman.
Talks will be held from 12:30pm to 1:30pm (PST) on selected Wednesdays. Lunch will be provided for the in-person events.
Moderator
Clark Freshman, Professor of Law, Center for Negotiation and Dispute Resolution (CNDR), UC Law San Francisco
Schedule of Speakers
Wednesday, September 3, 2025 from 12:30-1:30pm (PT)
The Dynamics of Infrastructure Dispute Mitigation
David Hoffman, John H. Watson, Jr. Lecturer on Law at Harvard Law School
Via Zoom
Wednesday, September 17, 2025 from 12:30-1:30pm (PT)
The Practical Realities of Seeking Disability Accommodations: Burdens, Backlashes, and Conflict Resolution Breakthroughs
Dan Berstein, MHS | MH Mediate
Via Zoom
Wednesday, October 15, 2025 from 12:30-1:30pm (PT)
Impartiality or Injustice? Re-examining Neutrality in Mediation Through a Racial Justice Lens
Sharon Press, Director, Dispute Resolution Institute, Robins Kaplan Distinguished Professor, Mitchell Hamline School of Law
Isabelle Gunning, Mayor Tom Bradley Professor of Law, Southwestern Law School
Via Zoom
Wednesday, October 22, 2025 from 12:30-1:30pm (PT)
Now, Women Do Ask: A Call to Update Beliefs about the Gender Pay Gap
Laura Kray, Ned & Carol Spieker Professor of Leadership, Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley
In-person and Via Zoom
Wednesday, October 29, 2025 from 12:30-1:30pm (PT)
Pedagogies in the Meantime: Reflections on ADR and Restorative Justice in U.S. and Canadian Legal Education
Amy Cohen, Robert J. Reinstein Chair in Law, Temple University Beasley School of Law
Daniel Del Gobbo, Assistant Professor & Chair in Law, Gender, and Sexual Justice, University of Windsor Faculty of Law
Via Zoom
Speakers
Clark Freshman
Clark Freshman is a tenured professor of law at University of California College of Law, San Francisco.
Professor Clark Freshman was a professor of law at the University of Miami from 1995 until 2007 before joining the UC Law SF faculty in 2007. He received his B.A. from Harvard, where his senior thesis facilitated a pardon in the infamous Leo Frank case, an M.A. from University College, Oxford, where he was a Marshall Scholar, and a J.D. from Stanford Law School. He clerked for Judge William Norris of the Ninth Circuit and practiced appellate and entertainment dispute resolution with Manatt Phelps in Los Angeles for several years. He is also a mediator, negotiation trainer, and expert witness on arbitration. He has been an invited speaker on negotiation at many law schools, including Harvard, Yale, and UCLA. His work has appeared in law reviews at Harvard, Stanford, Cornell, and elsewhere.
Professor Freshman’s scholarship and teaching focuses primarily on dispute resolution, including law and psychology, the effect of emotion on dispute resolution, lie detection, and emotional skills. In collaboration with Paul Ekman, the scientific advisor to Fox’s Lie to Me, Professor Freshman trains lawyers and negotiators in lie detection and emotional skills worldwide. Professor Freshman also works with the Center for Contemplative Mind to promote meditation and other contemplative practices among lawyers and law students. His scholarship addresses the relationship between different forms of discrimination in law and social science, including both the role of discrimination in negotiation, proof of discrimination, and ways to prevent negotiation and promote acceptance.
In his spare time, Professor Freshman enjoys all kinds of yoga, weightlifting, meditation, in-line skating, travel, movies and any opportunity to visit the beach or other water with and without his Tibetan terrier, Tara.
David Hoffman
David A. Hoffman is the John H. Watson, Jr. Lecturer on Law at Harvard Law School, where he teaches three courses: Mediation; Legal Profession: Collaborative Law; and Diversity and Dispute Resolution. David includes in each of those courses a discussion of the IFS model. David is also an attorney, mediator, arbitrator, and founding member of Boston Law Collaborative, LLC, where he handles cases involving family, business, employment, and other disputes.
Prior to founding BLC in 2003, David was a litigation partner at the Boston firm Hill & Barlow, where he practiced family law, employment law, and general litigation for 17 years. He is past-chair of the American Bar Association Section of Dispute Resolution and a recipient of Lifetime Achievement Awards from the American College of Civil Trial Mediators and the Academy of Professional Family Mediators. David has published three books (including “Bringing Peace into the Room”) and more than 100 articles on law and dispute resolution.
David is a graduate of Princeton University (A.B. 1970, summa cum laude), Cornell University (M.A. 1974, American Studies), and Harvard Law School (J.D. 1984, magna cum laude), where he was an editor of the Harvard Law Review. David’s TEDx talk about “Lawyers as Peacemakers” can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKXv1_Sqe_4. David lives in a cohousing community in Acton, Massachusetts with his wife, Leslie Warner, who is a career coach. Together they have five adult children, an adolescent cat, and a rescued Golden Retriever from Serbia. Links to his publications can be found here: https://blc.law/team/david-hoffman.
Dan Berstein
Dan Berstein is a mediator living with bipolar disorder working to empower all mental health stakeholders using conflict resolution best practices that promote mental health empowerment and prevent mental illness discrimination. Dan’s book, Mental Health and Conflicts: A Handbook for Empowerment, was originally published by the ABA in 2022 and is being republished this year by DRI Press. Through Dan’s company, MH Mediate, Dan has helped thousands of organizations become more accessible, trauma-informed, and consistent when responding to challenges. In 2023, the AAA-ICDR foundation funded BiasResistantCourts.org, a free platform Dan developed in collaboration with the CUNY Dispute Resolution Center and court systems around the country, teaching court-connected professionals twelve core skills for becoming bias-resistant and trauma-informed. In 2024, Dan led the “Demystifying Distress” event co-sponsored by Mediate.com, ACR, APFM, NAFCM, and CPR. The free resources from this event have helped dispute resolution professionals to manage their own distress while reducing distress for the parties they serve. In 2025, Dan launched free resources to help people living with mental health conditions use conflict resolution best practices when seeking support, reorienting from rejection, and pursuing disability accommodations, all as part of projects funded by the New York State Office of Mental Health’s statewide stigma reduction efforts and the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene’s Office of Consumer Affairs. Recently, Dan has been celebrating twenty years since his first hospitalization and diagnosis of bipolar disorder as part of his 20 Years Embracing Bipolar project accessible at www.danberstein.com/20years
Sharon Press
Sharon Press is Director of the Dispute Resolution Institute and the Robins Kaplan Distinguished Professor of Litigation Skills and International Dispute Resolution at Mitchell Hamline School of Law in St. Paul, MN. Press serves on the board of the Institute for the Study of Conflict Transformation. Press is a Florida Supreme Court certified county and family mediator and on Minnesota’s Rule 114 Roster of Civil Facilitative and Hybrid Neutrals. She mediates regularly in Conciliation, Housing, and Harassment Courts and for the Minnesota Department of Human Rights. Prior to joining Mitchell Hamline Law, Press served as director of the Florida Dispute Resolution Center where she was responsible for the ADR programs for the Florida state court system during its formative years. Press was the Association for Conflict Resolution’s representative to the Drafting Committee for the Model Standards of Conduct for Mediators adopted by the AAA, ABA and ACR. She received her B.A. from The George Washington University School of Public and International Affairs and her J.D. from The George Washington University National Law Center.
Isabelle Gunning
Isabelle Gunning (she/hers) was motivated to study law in order to support progressive changes in our larger society. Before becoming a professor, she was a criminal defense attorney with the Public Defender Service in Washington, D.C. and a human rights attorney with the Southern Africa Project of the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. She is currently the Mayor Tom Bradley Professor of Law at Southwestern Law School. She teaches and writes in the area of Conflict Resolution/ Alternative Dispute Resolution. She also teaches Evidence. She also writes in the area of religious/spiritual lawyering. Her main research interests are around justice and fairness in mediation as well as multicultural dialogue and the search for and creation of shared values in the context of racial inequality and other socially defined power hierarchy dynamics. She serves as a commissioner on the Los Angeles County Commission on Human Relations and is a board member on the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California. She practices as a mediator and an arbitrator. She works as a mediator/facilitator in support of resolving community conflicts. In addition, she has over 15 years of experience serving as a labor arbitrator and hearing examiner in workplace disputes.
Laura Kray
Laura Kray received her PhD in Psychology from the University of Washington. Prior to joining UC Berkeley in 2002, she taught at the University of Arizona and completed a post-doctoral fellowship at Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. Since 2018, Kray has been the faculty director of UC Berkeley’s Center for Equity, Gender, and Leadership. She is a leading expert on the role of gender stereotypes, power and status, and mindsets on workplace behavior, including negotiations and ethical decision-making. Her work has been supported by the National Science Foundation and has been recognized with multiple best research awards from the Academy of Management and the International Association of Conflict Management.
Amy Cohen
Amy Cohen is the inaugural holder of the Robert J. Reinstein Chair in law at Temple University Beasley School of Law. Amy’s research focuses on two areas of sociolegal scholarship—informal justice, including among people building alternatives to the criminal legal system, and law and economic development, including the law and political economy of agriculture and food. Before joining Temple, she was the John C. Elam/Vorys Sater Professor of Law at The Ohio State University and Professor of Law at UNSW Sydney, where she remains an honorary professor. Amy has taught a range of classes including property law, family law, mediation, negotiation, international dispute resolution, law and development, food law, and experimentalist legal theory. She has held visiting professorships at Harvard Law School, Osgoode Hall Law School, the University of Turin Faculty of Law, and the West Bengal National University of Juridical Sciences. She has also held fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, the American Institute of Indian Studies at the University of Chicago, the Fulbright Program, and the Collegio Carlo Alberto. She used several of these fellowships to develop a multi-year project on smallholder farmers and economic justice in India.
Daniel Del Gobbo
Daniel Del Gobbo (daniel.delgobbo@uwindsor.ca) is an Assistant Professor and Chair in Law, Gender & Sexual Justice at the University of Windsor Faculty of Law. Daniel’s research and teaching fall at the intersections of civil procedure and dispute resolution, restorative justice, human rights and equality, legal ethics, and gender and sexuality. He has published widely in peer-reviewed journals and edited collections, including the Osgoode Hall Law Journal, UBC Law Review, Canadian Bar Review, Journal of Law and Equality, Dalhousie Law Journal, Cardozo Journal of Conflict Resolution, and the Ohio State Journal on Dispute Resolution. His book, Feminist Frontlines: Campus Sexual Violence and Conflict Resolution, is under contract with the University of Toronto Press. Before coming to Windsor, Daniel was a Banting Postdoctoral Fellow at the McGill University Faculty of Law. He earned his J.D. from Osgoode Hall Law School in 2011, LL.M. from Harvard Law School in 2015, and S.J.D. from the University of Toronto Faculty of Law in 2021.