Frank Sander

Frank E.A. Sander ’52, a longtime Harvard Law School professor and a pioneer in the field of Alternative Dispute Resolution, has died. He was 90.

Mentorships between Harvard Law School professors and the students who followed them into academia have taken many forms over the course of two centuries.

In November, the Harvard Negotiation and Mediation Clinical Program celebrated its 10th anniversary, marking its evolution into a robust program of global clinical work in dispute systems design, innovative pedagogy around teamwork, and expanded course offerings in multiparty negotiation, group decision-making, teams and facilitation.

This past January, three students from Harvard Law School’s Negotiation and Mediation Clinical Program traveled to Chile to investigate the Ministry of Justice’s neighborhood multi-door courthouse pilot program.

“Late Justice is not Justice, but manifest injustice,” wrote Ruy Barbosa de Oliveira (1849-1923), perhaps the most prominent jurist and statesman in the history of Brazil. I was struck by these words during my first year of law school in São Paulo.

Imagine for a moment a lawsuit involving, as so many of them do, a dispute over accounting practices. Now add some complex questions of federal jurisdiction and procedure. Then assume that the parties decide—wisely—to settle. As the saying goes, “Who you gonna call?”

When I first began to work with Frank Sander ’52 as a 3L at Harvard Law School in 1997, I realized that when it came to finding a mentor in alternative dispute resolution, I had struck gold.

Frank E.A. Sander '52 had nearly two decades under his belt teaching tax and family law at HLS when Chief Justice Warren Burger tapped him to present a paper on alternative dispute resolution 29 years ago.

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