Professor to receive Outstanding Scholar Award

Professor Carrie Menkel-Meadow, University of California at Irvine School of Law, will receive the 2018 Outstanding Scholar Award from the Fellows of the American Bar Foundation at its 62nd Annual Awards Reception and Banquet on Saturday, Feb. 3 at 6 p.m. at the Vancouver Club, 915 West Hastings St., Vancouver, British Columbia. The banquet is one of several events hosted by The Fellows of the American Bar Foundation during the Midyear Meeting of the American Bar Association.  The Right Honourable Beverley McLachlin, former Chief Justice of Canada, will deliver keynote remarks.

The award recognizes Menkel-Meadow’s decades-long work in creating, building, shaping and internationalizing the field of alternative dispute resolution, and for her major contributions to the studies of the legal profession and feminism.

Awarded annually since 1957, the Outstanding Scholar Award is given by the Fellows of the American Bar Foundation (ABF) to an individual who has engaged in outstanding scholarship in the law or government. Previous recipients of the award include Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg; Laurence H. Tribe, Carl M. Loeb University Professor, Harvard Law School; Lawrence M. Friedman, Marion Rice Kirkwood Professor of Law, Stanford Law School; Richard Posner, former Circuit Judge, 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals; Erwin Griswold, Solicitor General of the United States (1967-73) and former dean, Harvard Law School; and Archibald Cox, Solicitor General of the United States (1961-65.)

“I am deeply honored to be recognized by an institution I love and respect, the American Bar Foundation, for its own path-breaking empirical work on law and legal institutions and to be nominated by one’s own research peers — there is nothing better than that in our work as legal academics,” said Menkel-Meadow.

“It is a true honor for all of us at the ABF – our faculty, staff, board of directors, and especially our honorary Fellows – to bestow this award upon Professor Carrie Menkel-Meadow,” said Ajay Mehrotra, executive director and research professor, American Bar Foundation, and professor of law and history, Northwestern University. “She has not only been a pioneer in the type of empirical and interdisciplinary research that is the hallmark of the ABF, she has also been an institutional leader in shaping socio-legal scholarship, particularly in the field of dispute resolution.”

A founder of the dispute resolution field, Menkel-Meadow is an international expert in alternative dispute resolution, international dispute resolution, the legal profession, legal ethics, clinical legal education, feminist legal theory, and women in the legal profession. Her scholarship includes more than 15 books and 150 articles in these areas. She is the author of Mediation and Its Applications for Good Decision Making and Dispute Resolution (2016); Dispute Resolution: Beyond the Adversarial Model (2nd ed. 2011); Negotiation: Processes for Problem Solving (2nd ed. 2014); Mediation: Theory, Policy & Practice (2nd ed. 2013); and Dispute Processing & Conflict Resolution (2003). She has also been a co-editor of the Journal of Legal Education, and the International Journal of Law in Context. In 2012, she published a three-volume set of edited books on Complex Dispute Resolution, including Foundational Processes, Multi-Party Processes, and International Dispute Resolution.

In 2011, Menkel-Meadow received the first-ever Award for Outstanding Scholarly Work presented by the American Bar Association’s Dispute Resolution section. As a Fulbright Scholar in 2007, Prof. Menkel-Meadow taught and conducted research in Chile, Argentina, and China. She has won the Center for Public Resources’ First Prize for Scholarship in Alternative Dispute Resolution three times (1983, 1990, and 1998.)

Menkel-Meadow joined UCI Law in 2008 as a member of its founding faculty. She is also the A.B. Chettle, Jr. Professor of Dispute Resolution and Civil Procedure Emerita at Georgetown University Law Center, and director of the Georgetown-Hewlett Program in Conflict Resolution and Legal Problem Solving.

Menkel-Meadow sits on numerous boards of public interest organizations and the editorial boards of journals in dispute resolution, law and social science and feminism. She has chaired the AALS Sections on Law and Social Science, Alternative Dispute Resolution, and Women in Legal Education, and has been on the Executive Committee of the Section on Clinical Education. She is a member of the American Law Institute and an elected member of the Academy of Civil Trial Mediators. She served for 10 years on the Board of Directors of the American Bar Foundation and is currently a member of the Board of the International Center for Prevention and Resolution of Disputes (CPR.)

In addition to her scholarship, research and teaching, Menkel-Meadow often serves as a mediator and arbitrator in public and private settings and has trained lawyers, judges, diplomats, and mediators in the United States and on five continents. She has consulted for such organizations and institutions as the United Nations, the World Bank and the Federal Judicial Center on conflict resolution systems and processes.

Menkel-Meadow earned her A.B., magna cum laude, from Barnard College, and her J.D., cum laude, from the University of Pennsylvania Law School.