Jan 11 2025 to Jan 11 2025 11 a.m.

Where

Bangalore International Centre

7 4th Main Rd, Stage 2, Domlur 560071

Event Description

Conflict at home, with neighbours, between communities. Conflicts about what the law means or should be.  Large collisions of power within and between institutions or nations.

In this session on mediation, Hiram Chodosh will present both a global and local perspective to mediation in India. He will discuss the virtues, capabilities, and skills that make mediation a powerful response to conflict. He will evaluate the value of mediation in practice, including in the USA and other parts of the globe, within courts, communities, legislative bodies, international relations, and the role of professional mediators and lawyers in this practice.

Sriram Panchu will present the perspective of the most senior mediation expert and leader in India. He will speak about the growth of mediation in India, its use in the court sector, commercial disputes, significant public disputes like the Ayodhya Babri Masjid – Ram Janambhoomi one, the Mediation Act 2023, the prospects for private mediation. He will also speak about the current foundations for mediation practice in India, the professional career paths, the role of centres and other programs that advance its targeted application in legal and other kinds of disputes.

Thereafter, Hiram Chodosh and Sriram Panchu will have a conversation reflecting on the roots of Indian mediation and its future prospects, including lessons from Indian mediation that the world can learn from and the crucial initiatives now needed to take mediation to the next level of impact and value for meaningful practice and careers.

A Q&A session with the audience will follow.

 
Speakers
Hiram E. Chodosh
President, Claremont McKenna College

A renowned scholar and innovator in higher education and global justice reform, Hiram Chodosh is the fifth president of Claremont McKenna College, which was recently ranked 1st among U.S. liberal arts colleges and 5th overall among U.S. universities by The Wall Street Journal.

Chodosh has worked on reform projects or studies in more than a dozen countries including India. He is the co-author of many articles on mediation in India, including Indian Civil Justice Reform: Limitation and Preservation of the Adversarial Process (with Chief Justice A.M. Ahmadi and Abhishek M. Singhi in 1997), and Mediation in India: A Toolkit (with Niranjan Bhatt and Firdosh Kassam) in 2003. In 2011, he received the Gandhi Peace Award and has been recognized as one of the 25 most influential legal educators in the country. His  academic publications include Judicial Independence: Cornerstone of Democracy (with Shimon Shetreet, eds., Brill Nijhoff, 2024); Uniform Civil Code of India: A Blueprint for Scholarly Discourse (with Shimon Shetreet, 2016) and Law in Iraq: A Document Companion (with Chibli Mallat, eds., 2013), and Global Justice Reform: A Comparative Methodology (NYU Press, 2005).

Chodosh is a graduate of Wesleyan University and Yale Law School. He specialized in transnational practice at Cleary Gottlieb in New York before joining the Case Western Reserve University School of Law faculty. He became dean of the S.J. Quinney College of Law at the University of Utah in 2006. He also served as the Hugh B. Brown Endowed Presidential Professor of Law and the Senior Presidential Advisor on Global Strategy.
Sriram Panchu
Senior Advocate, Mediator and Arbitrator

Sriram Panchu has been in the forefront of the mediation movement in India, and is an internationally recognized Indian mediator.

He is an alumnus of the Government Law College, Bombay. He commenced practice in 1976 at the Madras High Court and was designated a Senior Advocate in 1996. His field of law practice is constitutional and commercial law, and he has appeared pro bono in several significant public interest.

For almost thirty years he has been in the forefront of the mediation movement in India. In 2005, he set up India’s first court – annexed mediation centre at the Madras High Court, and has assisted the Supreme Court and other High Courts to do so. He has trained over a thousand mediators. His books on mediation are Settle for More (2007) and Mediation Practice & Law (2011 and 2015) and the Commercial Mediation Monograph (2019).

He has mediated a large number of complex and high-value commercial disputes in India and abroad. He has also been appointed by the Supreme Court of India to mediate significant public disputes; this includes a border dispute between the States of Assam and Nagaland, and a dispute within the Parsi community in Bombay over a ban on priests. Panchu is a former member of the National Legal Services Authority of India, (NALSA) and Founder President of the national association Mediators India.

He was a Director of the International Mediation Institute (IMI) and is on the panel of senior mediators of national and international institutions. He heads The Mediation Chambers which offers a range of mediation services. He serves on the committees of several public charitable and social organizations.