Master of Legal Studies Alternative Dispute Resolution Concentration Draws Students with Many Backgrounds
Alternative dispute resolution (ADR) has been in the news lately, from Disney’s attempt to bind a man suing over his wife’s death at a Disney resort to his Disney+ streaming service’s arbitration clause to Olympic gymnast Jordan Chiles’ appeal to the Court of Arbitration for Sport over her revoked bronze medal.
“We’ve all been involved in dispute resolution,” said arbitrator and mediator Brian Clauss, noting that something as simple as helping one’s children solve a backseat squabble requires dispute resolution skills.
Mediation and arbitration are often used by non-lawyers in a variety of settings from construction to labor disputes. That’s why, in 2020, the University of Arizona James E. Rogers College of Law began developing the Alternative Dispute Resolution Concentration for the Master of Legal Studies (MLS) degree program.
Created by Clauss, Director of Advocacy Barbara Bergman, and Professor Paul Bennett, the concentration requires students to complete 15 credits of ADR-related courses as part of the 30-credit MLS program. All courses in the concentration are taught online and focus on experiential learning -- like conducting negotiations for instructors to critique.
Global learning
The ADR concentration is one of 14 concentrations available in the University of Arizona Law MLS program. As with most of the program, ADR courses are taught entirely online asynchronously, allowing students with a variety of backgrounds to earn the degree and the concentration from anywhere. Students taking the concentration’s mediation course also earn the 40 hours of mediation training required for certification required in many states in order to offer mediation services.
The instructors in the concentration reflect the global nature of the program, with emerging leaders in the field of dispute resolution from around the world. The faculty includes a number of dispute resolution professionals who are not lawyers, providing different perspectives on problem solving.
“One of the things we try to do is identify the people who are at the point in their career where they’re the next wave of experts,” says Clauss. “That’s also important to ensure that the experts we’re helping – the next wave of national experts and international experts – broadly reflect society at large.”
Valuable skills in any profession
Courses in the concentration were first offered in the spring of 2021 and enrollment has steadily increased since then. According to Bergman, core classes like advanced negotiations regularly fill up. The concentration draws students from many professions, from non-U.S. lawyers to human resources professionals.
According to Bergman, “People need these kinds of skills of how to relate to people, how to read people, how to pull information from people. These are really important skills, and we all use them all the time, but most of the time we’ve had no training whatsoever on how to be more effective at doing it, and no practice of somebody giving us feedback when we’re doing it. That was the idea here.”