Michael Moffitt

Michael Moffitt is the Philip H. Knight Dean and Professor of Law at the University of Oregon School of Law. Prior to serving as Dean, Mr. Moffitt was the Associate Dean for Academic Affairs, the Associate Director of the Appropriate Dispute Resolution Center at the University of Oregon, where he taught negotiation, dispute resolution, and civil procedure. Prior to joining the Oregon faculty, he was a Lecturer on Law at Harvard Law School and served as the Clinical Supervisor of the Harvard Mediation Program. Immediately after law school, Mr. Moffitt served as a law clerk to United States District Judge Ann Aldrich. Mr. Moffitt spent several years as a consultant with Conflict Management Group, designing and delivering mediation services, negotiation coaching, and training workshops around the world. His clients have ranged from senior judges to tribal leaders, from unionized prison guards to accountants, from railroad officials to diplomatic academy trainees.

His practical experience includes a wide range of complex public and private sector efforts. Working in conjunction with the World Health Organization and consultants from Conflict Management Group, he has worked to help developing countries in Africa and Asia to improve their negotiations regarding health sector funding. This effort included training, strategic consultation, and the publication of a customized negotiation workbook for ministry officials in dozens of developing countries. He helped lead intervention and assistance programs to disputing parties in the ethnically divided Caucasus region of the former Soviet Union. Mr. Moffitt has also provided strategic assistance and advice to teams preparing for important negotiations, including land and water claims, dispute settlements, and labor contracts. More locally, over the past decade, he has assisted a number of school districts and teachers’ associations with their collective bargaining processes, serving as mediator and as factfinder. In addition to the mediation and negotiation training programs at Harvard Law School, Mr. Moffitt has consulted with and conducted programs for universities, lawyers, business leaders, government officials, and practicing mediators.

Mr. Moffitt has published more than twenty scholarly articles on mediation and negotiation. He co-edited The Handbook of Dispute Resolution, (Jossey-Bass, 2005), an award-winning compilation of 31 original chapters by leading scholars and practitioners in the field. He also co-authored the innovative, student-focused book, Dispute Resolution: Examples & Explanations (Aspen 2008) (2d ed. Aspen 2011).

The Provost of the University of Oregon named Mr. Moffitt in the first group of recipients of a five-year award from the Oregon Fund for Faculty Excellence. The Oregon law school faculty awarded Mr. Moffitt with the law school’s Orlando J. Hollis Faculty Teaching Award. He is also the recipient of the University’s Ersted Award for Distinguished Teaching.

A graduate of Marietta College and Harvard Law School, he is a devoted but mediocre snowboarder, an aggressive tennis player, an avid wine taster, and the exhausted parent of two young daughters.