Location
Thompson 240

Office Hours:
Tuesdays 1:30-3:00pm - Appointments by phone or video conference only; email me to schedule

Degree: Oberlin College, undergraduate; University of Massachusetts/Amherst, masters and doctorate.

Program: Legal Studies

Bio

Leah is Senior Lecturer II on the faculty in the Legal Studies Program where she has taught since 1993 and she is on the Steering Committee of The Center for Justice, Law, and Societies. Her teaching and research utilize law and society scholarship, to interrogate the relationship between disputing and justice. Her areas of concentration are the impact of identity, inequality, and technology on the transformation of conflict and furtherance of justice through dispute resolution processes in offline and online geographies. Her current research projects include AI, ethics and dispute resolution, crowdsourcing and spatial justice, technological responses to disaster and digital harm doing. She recently completed three National Science Foundation funded research projects on online dispute resolution with multidisciplinary and multi-institutional research teams.

Leah is Director of the National Center for Technology and Dispute Resolution (NCTDR), Past President and founding board member of the International Council for Online Dispute Resolution (ICODR), serves on the editorial boards of the International Journal of Online Dispute Resolution and Conflict Resolution Quarterly, and has served two terms on the Association of Conflict Resolution Board of Directors. Leah founded and directs the Art of Conflict Transformation Event Series at UMASS Amherst that produced the UMass Mural that hangs in the Campus Center. Since 2007 it has brought together over 5000 scholars, artists, conflict resolvers, and students to explore the geography of conflict; the spaces in and on which conflict has been imprinted and expressed, and the emerging terrains of resistance, resilience, and transformation. Leah is a member of Healing Through Remembering (Belfast).

Without coding fairness and equality into artificial intelligence (AI), it won't emerge as an outcome.
NO CODE, NO JUSTICE.

Grants

  • The Fourth Party: Improving Computer-Mediated Deliberation through Cognitive, Social and Emotional Support (National Science Foundation)
  • Process Families and their Application to Online Dispute Resolution (National Science Foundation)
  • Process Technology for Achieving Government Online Dispute Resolution (National Science Foundation)
  • Native Hawaiian Dispute Resolution Processes (Marion and Jasper Whiting Foundation)
  • Indigenous Phenology and Addressing Environmental and Community Imbalances (Funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation; via Five Colleges, Incorporated and Native American and Indigenous Studies Gathering at the Crossroads project)

Publications

Teaching

  • Alternative Dispute Resolution (Legal Studies 368)
  • Environmental Justice (Legal Studies 432)
  • Environmental and Public Policy Dispute Resolution (Legal Studies 494DI) (IE)
  • Mediation and the Courts (Legal Studies 426)
  • The Irish Peace Process (Part One) (Legal Studies 482)
  • The Irish Peace Process:  After The Good Friday Agreement (Part Two) (Legal Studies 484)
  • Racial Conflict, Mediation, and Social Justice (Legal Studies 497R)
  • Conflict Resolution (Public Policy 621)
  • Research Exploration Seminar (490H)