DR. JUDY MACFARLANE is a Full Professor at the Faculty of Law of the University of Windsor (0.5). Dr. Macfarlane devotes the other half of her time to her consulting practice which offers conflict resolution service, training, facilitation and systems design for a range of public and private sector clients. Dr. Macfarlane is an experienced mediator, having mediated more than 600 disputes including business, workplace, organizational, contract, tort, professional disciplinary/ regulatory, special education and public administrative matters. In addition, Dr. Macfarlane has extensive experience as a facilitator working with government, management groups, unions, universities, professional associations, and not-for-profit organizations in developing consensus in planning, policy-making and conflict resolution strategies.  In 2005 she was the first Canadian recipient of the International Academy of Mediators’ Award of Excellence, presented annually to an individual mediation practitioner.

Over the past ten years, Dr. Macfarlane has provided mediation training for legal practitioners, law students, civil servants, union and management groups, aboriginal council members, legal aid workers and health care professionals.

Dr. Macfarlane has been appointed a number of times to report to government on ADR policies and programs. In February 1994 she reported to the Ontario Ministry of Housing on the development of mediation for resolving landlord/tenant disputes. In December 1995 she reported to the Ontario Ministry of the Attorney-General as the evaluator for the Ontario Court (General Division) ADR pilot, the forerunner of Ontario’s current court-connected mediation program. Both of these reports were relied on by Ontario’s Civil Justice Review in the formulation of ADR policy including legislation and rules of civil procedure. In 2003, she was Virtual Scholar in Residence at the Law Commission of Canada and was the principal author of the Law Commissioners 2003 policy paper (“Transforming Relationships Through Participatory Justice”) presented to the Minister of Justice. In 2005 she completed a major report for the Department of Justice on collaborative family lawyering “The Emerging Phenomenon of Collaborative Family Law”. She is presently working with the Department of Justice in the development and evaluation of ADR initiatives in federal cases.

Dr. Macfarlane’s research focuses on the evaluation of dispute resolution programs (Ontario’s mandatory mediation program (1995), The Public Service Staff Relations Board grievance mediation pilot (2000) The Canadian Human Rights Tribunal mediation pilot (2000), and Sakatchewan’s Queen’s Bench mediation program (2003), and the impact of changing dispute resolution practices on the work of lawyers (“Culture Change? Commercial Litigators and the Ontario Mandatory Mediation Program” (2001) for the Law Commission of Canada), “The Impact of Collaborative Lawyering of the Delivery of Legal Services” (2001/2004) funded by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada). Her current SSHRC-funded research is examining the use and choice of Islamic dispute resolution processes in mosques in Canada and the US, especially in relation to religious divorce.

Dr. Macfarlane is the editor of Dispute Resolution : Readings and Case Studies  (Emond Montgomery) a student text used widely in ADR courses in Canadian law schools which has now been published in its 2nd edition. She is also the editor of Rethinking Disputes : the Mediation Alternative (Emond Montgomery, 1997), as well as numerous periodical articles on dispute resolution and mediation. Her new book, The New Lawyer : How Settlement is Transforming the Practice of Law, was published by UBC Press in 2008.