Mediation Clinic
Founded: 1986
A clinic student conducts a mediation at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission office.
Penn Law's Mediation Clinic was one of the first real case programs of its kind in the nation.
The Mediation Clinic focuses on developing students' skills and addresses the role and ethical issues in the mediation function. Mediation involves the intervention of a neutral third party into an existing or threatened dispute, with the aim of facilitating a negotiated resolution of the conflict. Lawyers are increasingly immersed in this arena, both as mediators and as traditional representatives of clients whose matters are subject to a mediation resolution. It is also a subject of great interest to transactional lawyers.
The course comprises two components:
Classroom: includes mediation (and related "alternatives" to formal adversary litigation), intensive simulated skills training, and observations of outside neutrals in actual adjudications and mediations. Using discussion, videos and simulation exercises, students are then trained intensively prior to commencing fieldwork. The course concludes with seminars on themes ranging from restorative justice to major commercial case and on-line ADR.
Fieldwork: students are the frontline mediators. With a faculty supervisor present, students co-mediate an average of 4-5 cases per semester at courthouse and other off-site settings in the areas of civil litigation, criminal, domestic and international child custody disputes and Equal Employment Opportunity Commission matters. Following each mediation, the students are "debriefed" by their faculty supervisor to complete the learning experience.
By the end of the course students will have learned a great deal about negotiation, advising, evaluating cases in litigation, presiding over a meeting -- as well as resolving conflicts as a mediator.
Professor Douglas Frenkel and two students mediate an international child custody matter using a technology-based format.
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- Instrumental in creating procedural guidelines for mediation systems in the Philadelphia Family Court and in student discipline matters at Penn.
- Clinic cases are featured in a new and widely-used theory and practice text THE PRACTICE OF MEDIATION: A VIDEO-INTEGRATED TEXT (Aspen Law & Business, 2008), co-authored by Mediation Clinic professor Douglas Frenkel (with James Stark)
- Students have been mediating Hague Convention cases involving the abduction of children across national borders.
- Clinic alumni have created court-based mediation programs and teach mediation courses throughout the U.S. and abroad.
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Douglas Frenkel, Morris Shuster Practice Professor of Law
Mediation Clinic
Adjuncts and Lecturers
Marcia Glickman, Lecturer in Law
Mediation Clinic
Sharon Eckstein, Lecturer in Law
Mediation Clinic
MEDIATION CLINIC
University of Pennsylvania Law School
Gittis Center for Clinical Legal Studies
3400 Chestnut Street
Philadelphia, PA 19104
Tel: 215.898.8427
Fax: 215.573.6783
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