Quinnipiac is pleased to welcome Professor Ellen Waldman for the Spring 2020 semester!
Professor Waldman visited Quinnipiac once before in the fall of 2008-2009, where she taught a variety of courses, including Alternate Dispute Resolution, Therapeutic Jurisprudence, and Bioethics. Currently, she is teaching Negotiations and covering the ethics curriculum in the medical school.
Medical students receive information and training about how to manage ethical issues arising the course of patient care throughout their 4 years in the classroom. In the first year, students are exposed to the underlying foundational theories that ground medical ethics concepts. Law students who majored in philosophy would be well-familiar with these theories; utilitarianism, deontological thinking and virtue ethics. As student proceed through their second and third years, they learn how these general theories are relevant to concrete subject matter, such as informed consent, the allocation of scarce resources and disputes over end of life care. By the end of their fourth year, students will have been exposed to negotiation and conflict resolution skills and provided some opportunity to practice the “soft skills” that most of us would want our physicians at the bedside to have. Professor Waldman believes that a strong grounding in ethical reasoning as well conflict resolution basics is as important to a medical student’s ability to practice as a thorough understanding of anatomy or pathology.
Professor Waldman explained how her early experiences in law practice led to her dual interests in dispute resolution and bioethics. When she first started practicing law, she was working at a litigation firm in Washington, D.C. on a huge insurance defense case involving a major manufacturer. The case had been going on in four separate jurisdictions, attended to by four major law firms, at the time her firm inherited the case. The files were voluminous, the work unending, the pace snail-like and the legal bills enormous. It was at this time she began to think that perhaps litigation was not the most societally efficient means of addressing conflict. She pursued mediation training at night and ultimately left the firm to obtain an L.L.M. in Mental Health Law at University of Virginia. Although the L.L.M. program was designed to train lawyers to represent mentally disabled clients, Professor Waldman used her time at Virginia to study dispute resolution specifically mediation. She essentially created her own program. She worked at a mediation center and, at the same time, took a bioethics course in the medical school.
While she was completing her L.L.M., she worked as a fellow at the Institute of Law, Psychiatry, and Public Policy in Charlottesville, Virginia as a discussion leader in the Bioethics course, which included medical students, lawyers, law students, and nurses. The interdisciplinary aspect was especially interesting as each contributor brought a different perspective, based on his or her education and experience, to bear on the complex issues under discussion. In 1992, Professor Waldman joined Thomas Jefferson School of Law (TJSL). At TJSL, she taught torts, remedies, bioethics, and ran the externship and judicial internship programs. (She said when you have been somewhere a long time, you end up doing a bit of everything). She founded and supervises the school’s Mediation Program. She has taught mediation-related courses nationally and internationally and has published over 25 articles and book chapters in the areas of alternative dispute resolution and bioethics.
Professor Waldman explained that mediation includes lots of different approaches, and the primary ethics rules guiding the profession were generated with the idea that parties would enter into mediation with attorneys. She is troubled by the plight of self -represented parties who find themselves in mediation without understanding their legal rights or alternatives to settlement. When self-represented parties ask mediators to help them assess their settlement options compared to the likelihood of success (or failure) outside of court, mediators are required by existing ethics rules to deflect the question. Mediation advocates frequently proclaim that mediation increases access to justice; Professor has just published an article questioning whether this thesis is true with regard to self-represented litigants and wondering whether the development of machine learning might meet the needs of low-resourced parties will protecting mediators from ethically compromising activities.
Prior to law school, Professor Waldman taught film and English at the American International School in Israel. Following law school, Professor Waldman clerked for the Honorable Myron Bright of the Eighth Circuit in Fargo, North Dakota and joined a litigation firm in Washington, D.C., specializing in insurance defense. While practicing in Washington, D.C., Professor Waldman received mediation training and subsequently was awarded a scholarship in 1990 to pursue an LL.M. in this area. While pursuing her LL.M. degree, she was a fellow at the Institute of Law, Psychiatry, and Public Policy in Charlottesville, Virginia.
A member of the TJSL faculty since 1992, Professor Waldman founded and supervises the school’s Mediation Program, which affords students an opportunity to mediate disputes in small claims court. In that capacity, she has secured grant funding from federal and local agencies, foundations and non-profits. She has taught mediation-related courses nationally and internationally and has published over 25 articles and book chapters in the areas of alternative dispute resolution and bioethics. Most recently, she has published Mediation Ethics: Case and Commentaries, an in-depth treatment of the many hard cases that can arise in mediation practice.