Professional Development Programs - Instructor Biography

Leonard L. Riskin is C.A. Leedy and Isidor Loeb Professor of Law at the University of Missouri-Columbia School of Law and he has served as Director of the Center for the Study of Dispute Resolution from 1984 to 2002, and again since July 2004. Since 1980, he has been mediating, writing about mediation, and training lawyers and law students in mediation and other methods of dispute resolution. He studied at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (B.S., 1964), New York University (J.D., 1967) and Yale (LL.M., 1974). He served as a trial attorney for the U.S. Department of Justice Land and Natural Resources Division, as general counsel of the National Alliance of Businessmen, both in Washington, D.C., and as a professor at the University of Houston Law Center. In winter 2003 he was a Visiting Professor at the University of Michigan Law School.

Much of Professor Riskin's work has centered on mindsets with which lawyers and other dispute resolvers approach their work. He has published numerous articles and several books on dispute resolution, including Dispute Resolution and Lawyers (With James Westbrook) (West Publishing Co. 1987, 2d ed. 1997, 3d ed., forthcoming 2003), and directed the Dispute Resolution and Lawyers Videotape Series (West Publishing Co. 1991). He has published articles on law in many academic journals, including the California Law Review and the Harvard Negotiation Law Review, and personal essays in popular publications, such as the Atlantic Monthly, the New York Times Magazine, and the Washington Post. He proposed a widely used system for understanding mediation based on the facilitative-evaluative and narrow-broad dimensions. For this work, which appeared in the Harvard Negotiation Law Review, he received a CPR Institute for Dispute Resolution award for the outstanding article on dispute resolution published in 1996. He also received a CPR outstanding practical achievement award for introducing alternative dispute resolution into law school curricula at the University of Missouri and other law schools and a lifetime achievement award from the International Academy of Mediators.

Professor Riskin has practiced mindfulness meditation since about 1990 and has completed mindfulness meditation teacher training at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center through the program then directed by Jon Kabat-Zinn and through the Forest Way Insight Meditation Center under the direction of Matthew Flickstein. Since 1999, he has taught mindfulness meditation to mediators, lawyers, law students, corporate executives and others across North America and in Austria and Denmark. He also provides advanced mediation training and negotiation training based on mindfulness. His article, The Contemplative Lawyer: On the Potential Relevance of Mindfulness Meditation to Law Students, Lawyers, and their Clients appeared in the Harvard Negotiation Law Review (May 2002) as the centerpiece of a symposium entitled Mindfulness in Law and Dispute Resolution.