Deborah Thompson Eisenberg

Deborah is Vice Dean and Piper & Marbury Professor of Law at the University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law. She serves as Faculty Director of Maryland Carey Law’s nationally ranked Dispute Resolution program and Center for Dispute Resolution. Professor Eisenberg teaches in the areas of conflict resolution, mediation, and civil procedure and is a recognized scholar in the areas of dispute resolution, employment law, and equal pay. She also mediates civil and employment discrimination cases and provides professional trainings on topics such as negotiation, mediation, and restorative practices. 

Prior to academia, Professor Eisenberg practiced complex civil litigation for more than fifteen years. She received her J.D. from Yale Law School in 1994 and graduated Valedictorian with a B.A. in Political Science from the University of Maryland Baltimore County in 1991. 

Keynote Speaker, speaking on “Mediation Clinics and Clinical Legal Education” 

Mediation clinics in which students are trained to play the role of “neutral” in a settlement-focused process rather than advocate in adversarial litigation create tensions for clinical law programs. In this keynote, Professor Deborah Thompson Eisenberg will discuss principles that guide clinical legal education pedagogy in the United States and explore how mediation clinics operate—sometimes awkwardly—within this framework. Based on the decades-long growth of mediation clinics in U.S. law schools, the talk will explore lessons for those forming or teaching in mediation clinics, as well as the value that mediation clinics provide for clinical law programs, legal education and wider society.