Robert M. O’Neil featured as keynote presenter at Eleventh Annual Spring Symposium in Dispute Resolution, April 29, 2011

WHAT: Dispute Resolution Symposium featuring keynote speaker Robert M. O’Neil
WHEN: Friday, April 29, 2010, from 8:30 a.m. to 4:00 p.m.; Keynote address is from 11:15 a.m. to 12:45 p.m.
WHERE: Jeffers Courtroom (TNH 3.140), UT School of Law
WHO: The public is invited to attend all presentations

Former University of Virginia president and current professor of law emeritus Robert O’Neil, an authority on the First Amendment, will discuss his observations of developments in the field of conflict resolution at the Eleventh Annual Spring Symposium on Dispute Resolution on Friday, April 29, 2011, at the University of Texas School of Law.

The symposium, hosted by the Center for Public Policy Dispute Resolution at the University of Texas School of Law, will also feature eleven UT graduate and law students presenting research on various dispute resolution topics. The student presentations and the keynote address are free and open to the public.

O’Neil will give the symposium’s keynote address, “Forging Paths in Dispute Resolution—A Lifelong Fascination,” in the Jeffers Courtroom at 11:15 a.m. The address will be followed by a panel presentation featuring H.W. Perry, associate professor of law and government; Professor Madeline Maxwell of the Communication Studies department; and Melissa Biggs-Coupal, Difficult Dialogues program coordinator.

Graduate students from the Cockrell School of Engineering, LBJ School of Public Affairs, and the School of Law will present their research on topics including plea bargaining in the war against al-Qaeda; the Catholic Church’s influence on labor arbitration; and child protection mediation in the Jeffers Courtroom and classroom TNH 3.142 from 8:35 a.m.–10:50 a.m. and 1:45 p.m.–3:30 p.m.

The symposium culminates the eleventh year of the interdisciplinary Graduate Portfolio Program in Dispute Resolution. Through this Portfolio Program, law and graduate students from ten academic units at the University of Texas at Austin pursue a focused curriculum of theory, skills, and research on dispute resolution.

For a schedule of the symposium’s events and to find more information on dispute resolution go to website of the Graduate Portfolio Program in Dispute Resolution.

About the keynote speaker:

Robert O’Neil is the director of the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression and an authority on the First Amendment. He is professor of law emeritus at the University of Virginia and teaches Constitutional Law of Free Speech and the Press and Church and State. He became the University of Virginia’s sixth president in 1985, a position he held until 1990. After his law school graduation, O’Neil clerked for U.S. Supreme Court Justice William J. Brennan Jr. In 1963 he began his law faculty career, first as a teacher at the University of California, Berkeley, and then as a teacher-administrator. His posts included provost of the University of Cincinnati, vice-president of Indiana University, and president of the statewide University of Wisconsin system.

About the keynote address,  “Forging New Paths in Dispute Resolution—A Lifelong Fascination”                           

Robert O’Neil will address the symposium on his experiences with alternative dispute resolution (ADR), from his initial encounter with Roger Fisher and Frank Sander as a Harvard Law student to exploring ADR as chair of Virginia’s first state commission on the future of its judicial system, as well as his directorship of the Ford Foundation’s Difficult Dialogues as an application of new approaches to meeting campus tensions over issues such as race, religion, sexual orientation, and immigration.  O’Neil then will look to a few promising areas for ADR exploration in current church and state law.

Event Contact: Mary Gaski, Center for Public Policy Dispute Resolution, UT Law, (512) 471-3507

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