Recent Harvard Law School Graduate Jessica Beess und Chrostin ’13 won a major law student writing competition with her paper, “Mandatory Arbitration Clauses in Donative Instruments: A Taxonomy of Disputes and Type-Differentiated Analysis.” The contest was sponsored by the Real Property, Trust and Estate Law section of the American Bar Association.
Last year, she participated in the 2012 Willem C. Vis International Commercial Arbitration Moot Competitions in Vienna where her team took honors arguing on the U.N. Convention on the International Sale of Goods, as well as procedural issues under the rules of different arbitral institutions.
“I have long been passionate about arbitration and alternative dispute resolution generally, but it frequently occurred to me that arbitration is lauded for its efficiency and suggested as a solution to many of the problems we see in litigation without much theoretical analysis or regard for the particularities of each practice area,” she said.
Professor Robert Sitkoff, an expert in trusts and estate law, advised Beess und Chrostin during the writing process. “After taking Professor Sitkoff’s class on trusts and estates, I wanted to explore whether arbitration makes sense as a dispute resolution mechanism for trust and estate disputes. The process of writing this paper was tremendously rewarding and I am especially thankful to Professor Sitkoff for his insightful guidance and supervision. It is an honor to have won the first place in the ABA Section on Real Property, Trusts and Estates’s writing competition and I am thrilled to be able to contribute to this growing field.”
Beess und Chrostin received her B.A. cum laude in English Literature and Political Science from Columbia College. After graduating from college, she spent a year studying law at Cambridge University in the UK, and in May 2013, she graduated cum laude from Harvard Law School. She currently practices international arbitration as an associate at King & Spalding, in New York City.