Jack Himmelstein is co-founder and co-director of the Center for Understanding in Conflict, formerly the Center for Mediation in Law, a national non-profit educational institute which trains lawyers and other professionals in the Understanding-Based model of conflict resolution (based in New York and California). He is co-author, with his colleague Gary Friedman, of Challenging Conflict: Mediation Through Understanding, recently published by the American Bar Association in cooperation with the Harvard Program on Negotiation (co-winner of the 2008 CPR International Institute for Conflict Resolution Outstanding Book Award).
In the Understanding-Based approach, the mediator works directly and simultaneously together with the parties throughout the mediation (a non-caucus model). This approach includes the law, but does not rely solely on the law. The goal is to support the parties in finding their resolution to their conflict based on their understanding of what they view as important to themselves and to each other.
For the past 30 years, Jack has conducted introductory and advanced trainings in this approach to resolving conflict throughout the United States, as well as in Europe and Israel for lawyers, psychologists, teachers and other professionals who work with conflict and teach in the field (through the Center and other institutes in this country and abroad including the American Bar Association, Harvard’s Program on Negotiation, and the NYS Office of Court Administration). For the last several years, these trainings have also included bringing this approach into the teaching of collaborative practice, focusing on the work of lawyers, psychologists (coaches), child specialists, and financial professionals. He also practices mediation in business, family, non-profit and other contexts.
Jack first practiced law as a civil rights lawyer with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and then moved to teaching at Columbia Law School where he focused on training students in the human dimensions of law practice and providing legal services to low income persons. While at Columbia, he also directed a project funded by the National Institute of Mental Health directed at training law teachers throughout the United States in humanistic approaches to law teaching, including the first trainings for law teachers in the teaching of mediation. Jack then became a co-founder of the City University of New York School of Law, where for ten years he helped develop and guide that school’s innovative experiential approach to training of lawyers in the public interest. During those years of teaching, he started his work with the Center and has since then devoted full time to developing and teaching the Understanding Based approach to resolving conflict and to practicing mediation.
