Prof. Ethan Katsh

Ethan Katsh is Professor Emeritus of Legal Studies at the University of Massachusetts. With Janet Rifkin, he established and directed, for many years, the National Center for Technology and Dispute Resolution. The Center (odr.info) continues to be the primary focal point of online and offline activities involving Online Dispute Resolution (ODR). Prof. Katsh is considered to be the founder of the field of online dispute resolution. In his first book, The Electronic Media and the Transformation of Law (Oxford University Press, 1989), and in his 1995 book Law in a Digital World (Oxford University Press), he was the first to discuss how deeply new information technologies would impact not only legal doctrines and rules of law but bring about broad changes to the rule of law itself. A decade later, he co-directed the eBay Online Dispute Resolution Project that led to eBay’s current system that handles over sixty million disputes each year. In 2001, with Prof. Janet Rifkin, he wrote Online Dispute Resolution: Resolving Conflicts in Cyberspace (John Wiley, 2001), the first book about ODR. The often-referred-to metaphor of technology as the “Fourth Party” originated in this book (2001). Prof. Katsh is a graduate of Yale Law School. His articles have appeared in the Yale Law Journal, the University of Chicago Legal Forum, and many other law reviews and legal periodicals. In recent years, he co-edited Online Dispute Resolution: Theory and Practice (Eleven International Publishing, 2nd ed., 2021)  and, with Orna Rabinovich-Einy, published  Digital Justice: Technology and the Internet of Disputes (Oxford University Press, 2017).  During 2010-2011, Prof. Katsh served as the Fulbright Distinguished Chair in the Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Haifa. In 2014-2015, Prof. Katsh was appointed an Affiliate of Harvard University’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. He has been a Visiting Prof. of Law and Cyberspace at Brandeis University. Prof. Katsh received the University of Massachusetts Chancellor’s Medal and gave the UMass distinguished faculty lecture. In 2017, he received the D’Alemberte-Raven Award from the American Bar Association Section of Dispute Resolution, the Section’s most prestigious award. In 2014, Prof. Katsh served as principal online dispute resolution consultant for the US Office of Government Information Services (OGIS), a federal agency mandated to provide mediation in Freedom of Information Act disputes. He has also advised the National Mediation Board in its resolution of airline and railroad disputes and assisted an internet start-up, SquareTrade, in developing software that has resolved many millions of disputes. From 2004 – 2010, Professor Katsh was co-Principal Investigator with several computer science faculty on three National Science Foundation-funded projects to model processes of online dispute resolution. This work was coordinated with the United States National Mediation Board. His current research interests involve both the resolution and prevention of disputes involving electronic medical records and identifying new paradigms in how to respond to the rapidly growing number of disputes generated by AI.