THOMAS STIPANOWICH a Professor of Law at Pepperdine’s Caruso School of Law, holds the William Webster Chair in Dispute Resolution. He is an internationally known scholar with many articles and books including Resolving Disputes: Theory, Practice and Law (4th ed. 2021); Federal Arbitration Law: Agreements, Awards & Remedies Under the Federal Arbitration Act (Best New Legal Book—Assoc. of American Publishers); and Commercial Arbitration at Its Best. He is also an experienced arbitrator and mediator (affiliated with JAMS) who focuses on facilitating effective process solutions with parties in conflict. Stipanowich co-led Pepperdine’s Straus Institute for Dispute Resolution from 2006-2020, during which it was ranked first a dozen times by academic peers in the U.S. News & World Report rankings. From 2001 to 2006, he headed the New York-based International Institute for Conflict Prevention & Resolution (CPR), one of the most prominent thought-leading institutions in the field. He was previously a lawyer specializing in dispute resolution and, from 1984 to 2001, a chaired law professor. Over the decades he has advised on reforms to legal standards governing arbitration and mediation as well as leading arbitration rules and ethics standards. He helped found a regional mediation center that is still in existence. He was one of the founders of the the College of Commercial Arbitrators, and later, chief editor of the College’s Protocols for Expeditious, Cost-Effective Arbitration. He served as Chair of the Securities Industry Conference on Arbitration and was primary drafter of the American Arbitration Association’s Consumer Due Process Protocol, which set minimum standards of procedural fairness for consumer arbitration. Stipanowich received the D’Alemberte-Raven Award of the ABA Dispute Resolution Section and CPR’s James F. Henry Award for his career contributions, along with a number of awards for his writings, and in 2024 was named to the California Dispute Resolution Hall of Fame. He was the first non-Indian honored as Distinguished Professor of Law by National Law University Delhi and is a member of the Affiliated Global Faculty of Peking University School of Law. He is currently at work on a book on Abraham Lincoln as a problem-solver and manager of conflict.
