Utah Law will host its annual Lee E. Teitelbaum Utah Law Review Symposium on Friday, Sept. 18, 2026. This year’s symposium, Dialogue, Disagreement, and Dispute Resolution, will examine the conceptual boundaries, practical models, and pedagogical interventions to assess the potentialities and limitations of dialogue as a process for fostering productive disagreement or transforming conflict.
Associate Professor Nicolás Parra-Herrera, who organized this year’s event, says the symposium extends two invitations.
“First, it invites participants to consider dialogue as a distinct process of conflict prevention, management, transformation, and resolution. Second, it seeks to foster an interdisciplinary conversation among dispute resolution scholars, social psychologists, philosophers, communication theorists, social activists, and experts in law and technology,” he explains. “Together, participants will examine the circumstances under which dialogue and related practices, such as civil disagreement and difficult conversations, can effectively address conflict. They will also consider whether dialogue is normatively desirable in interactions marked by power imbalances, deep polarization, and intractable conflict.”
Parra-Herrera notes that there is growing interest in finding ways to disagree more constructively, promote civil discourse, facilitate dialogue, and engage in difficult conversations, particularly in highly polarized environments.
“Initiatives pursuing these goals have emerged in education, politics, civil society, and the legal profession. The field of dispute resolution, which expanded rapidly in the late 1970s, has developed a range of procedures and practices—including negotiation, mediation, and restorative justice—as well as techniques for addressing conflict productively,” he says. “Yet less attention has been devoted to a building block underlying all these processes: dialogue across disagreement.”
The symposium is organized into four parts:
- Examining the meaning, objectives, and limitations of dialogue, as well as what dispute resolution theory and practice can contribute to making dialogue more effective in other contexts
- Exploring specific dialogue initiatives and practical models for using dialogue and difficult conversations to prevent, manage, and resolve conflict
- Discussing innovative perspectives and research from psychology, communication, philosophy, and technology to broaden our understanding of dialogue as a dispute resolution process
- Highlighting initiatives at the University of Utah and within civil society and the legal profession that have used dialogue to promote social change
“In short, the symposium will explore conceptual boundaries, practical models, and pedagogical interventions to assess the promises and risks of dialogue as a means of transforming conflict and dealing with disputes,” Parra-Herrera says. “I hope this conversation expands our conceptual imagination of what dialogue and productive disagreement can accomplish in a range of social settings, from the legal profession to education, and how they can help us address our differences constructively. I also hope that we can critically and reflectively examine the risks these initiatives may carry.”
Sam Gatlin, Utah Law Review executive symposium editor, says that while lawyers are trained to argue, it’s not the same as knowing how to actually engage with someone who sees things differently.
“Dialogue itself hasn’t gotten nearly as much attention as it should, given how central it is to what lawyers do every day,” he says. “Professor Parra-Herrera has done a wonderful job assembling a group of scholars and practitioners who bring real depth and range to the study of dialogue and conflict. I’m looking forward to hearing what the speakers bring to that conversation, and what it means for how we train the next generation of lawyers in an increasingly polarized world.”
Learn more and register for the symposium.