Practicum

Practical Experience

The Mediation Clinic not only teaches theory and skills, it provides practical experience through community service. For their field placements, students serve as mediators in Small Claims Court, for EEO claims filed by San Francisco City employees, for citizen complaints against the SF Police Department, and for retaliation claims filed with the California Department of Industrial Relations. Parties who voluntarily agree to mediation are assigned to students who co-mediate in pairs.

There's a big difference between classes with notes, outlines and exams, and actually doing it.You can't teach these skills in a lecture format. You get to try different strategies and experiment, stumbling across the lesson rather than being told. Things you discover for yourself stay with you."
- Elizabeth Potter '96, Family Law

Types of disputes mediated:

• landlord-tenant
• creditor-debtor
• employment
• consumer
• neighbor-to-neighbor

Read the Clinic course description.

The Mediation Observation Project (MOP) offers students enrolled in a Mediation class or clinic the opportunity to observe and reflect on live court-based, community and commercial mediations. The goal of MOP is to demonstrate how theoretical and simulated approaches to mediation play out in real life by exposing students to live mediations. Through MOP, students can witness the diversity of mediation styles and contexts used in this process.

CNDR coordinates mediation observations with the following organizations:

• U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California
• First District Court of Appeal
• San Francisco Community Boards
• JAMS

The ADR Externship Program offers in-depth practical experience and research opportunities to advanced students.  Under the guidance of Clinical Professor Carol Izumi, the program delves into the latest in dispute resolution science and craft to help students better understand process dynamics.  There are a broad variety of placements, including the San Francisco Superior Court (systems design and development projects), the California Mediation and Conciliation Service (public employee labor disputes), Marin Mediation Services (client intake and a wide variety of mediations), and San Francisco ACCESS Program (Small Claims Court and other self-represented litigant mediations and related work).