Prof. Jenuwine Helps Train Attorneys for Domestic Mediation

Notre Dame Law School and the St. Joseph County Courts are co-sponsoring a domestic relations mediation training program for area attorneys and law students this week on campus. Notre Dame Associate Clinical Professor of Law Michael Jenuwine serves as one of the program’s lead trainers.

“The majority of attorneys registered for the training have committed to providing some pro bono mediations once they’ve completed our training and are registered as mediators with the State of Indiana,” explains Jenuwine.

Changes in Indiana law have made funds available to provide low-cost mediation services to St. Joseph County residents who request such services through a county court. There has been an increasing need for trained mediators for families involved in divorce and paternity disputes.

Mediation reduces conflict between divorcing parents, allowing the parties to build on areas of cooperation and reach their own agreements rather than participate in adversarial court proceedings. Research has shown that a higher level of conflict between parents predicts higher levels of later child maladjustment. Based on that, reducing conflict between divorcing parents through mediation is healthier for children. Research also suggests that people take ownership of agreements that they have helped craft, and are therefore more likely to follow through with those agreements.

Jenuwine—who earned a B.S. from the University of Michigan in 1988, an M.A. from the University of Chicago in 1990, and a Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of Chicago and a J.D. cum laude from Loyola University Chicago in 2000—focuses his teaching and research on family law, child advocacy, mental health law, and interdisciplinary legal practice. He is working on research studying juvenile waiver of right to counsel in delinquency cases in Indiana, developing an empirical study of jurors’ ability to discern a “no doubt” standard in death penalty cases, and on research studying the effect of legislative responses to the clergy sex abuse scandal.

Contact: Dr. Michael Jenuwine, 574-631-7795 or Michael.J.Jenuwine.1@nd.edu

For more information about Professor Jenuwine, visit his faculty profile page.