Appreciation of Dwight Golann

As you may have heard, Dwight Golann will receive the ABA Section of Dispute Resolution’s scholarship award this year.

This has prompted a chorus of congratulations, and I join in the accolades for his work.

For many reasons.  Here are some of them.

He continues to practice mediation and his mediations clearly inform his work.  His ideas are realistic and pragmatic, helping us move toward more sophisticated understandings.  Several recent examples describe common patterns of loss and grief, mediators’ subtle expressions that don’t neatly fit into the traditional facilitative-evaluative typology, and a study about when lawyers and litigants choose to mediate.

He often partners with Marjorie Aaron, and we have benefitted from the synergy of their work.

He has worked to improve our skills teaching, producing a great library of videos and “classes-in-a-box.”  He has worked to help adjunct faculty, who do a substantial portion of ADR teaching and are likely to do an even larger share as a substantial cohort of us will retire in the foreseeable future.

He wrote this listserv post about our community:

I once thought of communities as immutable institutions.  I now know, though, that they exist only if people start, grow and continue to care for them.  We have built such a community for teachers of ADR, and we maintain it through the people who support our conferences, awards and activities.  Their efforts reflect what we care about – gaining knowledge and conveying it to our students.  Perhaps professors in other fields would have responded the same way, but I have a sense that we express the values we teach in the way we care for each other.

Dwight is part of what makes our community so special.

And he’s just a generally good guy.

What do you think?  Would you like to write a comment?

8 thoughts on “Appreciation of Dwight Golann”

  1. Wonderful to see your successes and scholarship.. no surprise! KHS gave you your start!!
    Seems I saw something about you a while ago, too.
    Does all seem lifetimes ago! Keep it up!

  2. And this guy keeps going: On the cover of the brand new May issue of Alternatives to the High Cost of Litigation, Dwight writes on the Zoom mediation phenomenon, looking ahead, in “‘I Sometimes Catch Myself Looking Angry or Tired …’: The Impact of Mediating by Zoom.” Here on the Wiley Online Library:
    https://doi.org/10.1002/alt.21891

    Available through your school Wiley account for you and your students, and if not, email us at Alternatives@cpradr.org.

  3. Congrats, Dwight!! This is a well-deserved honor. You have made an enormous contribution to our field with your writing, videos, workshops, and generous support of the work of colleagues in our field.

  4. Thank you Dwight for all your work with the Straus Institue at Pepperdine Law School. As an MDR student, I benefited from all your recordings and lessons.

  5. Hello Members of the ADR List Serve:
    I salute Dwight Golann as an incredibly talented scholar and a law professor whose books, articles, and videos have served as an invaluable guide for my teaching of law students in ADR at GW. His “Mediating Legal Disputes” is practical and readable and his support of teaching in this field is admirable. Congratulations, Dwight. You are much appreciated and I join in the celebration!

  6. Congratulations Dwight!! So deserving of this recognition for all your contributions. We appreciate you!

  7. Congratulations, Dwight! We appreciate all you have done for the field and look forward to celebrating you.

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