Sarah Rudolph Cole

• BA, University of Puget Sound, American History, 1986 (cum laude)
• JD, University of Chicago Law School, 1990 (cum laude)

In law school at the University of Chicago, Professor Cole was Editor-in-Chief of the University of Chicago Legal Forum and won the award for best paper written in the law school in 1990.  She graduated with honors.  Following law school, she clerked for the Hon. Eugene A. Wright of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

Professor Cole practiced labor and employment law with Heller, Ehrman, White & McAuliffe in Seattle and Seyfarth, Shaw, Fairweather & Geraldson in Chicago before joining the faculty at Creighton University School of Law. While at Creighton, and now at the Moritz College of Law, Professor Cole researches and writes about legal and policy issues that arise as a result of the increased use of alternative dispute resolution (ADR) in the justice system, particularly arbitration and mediation.

She teaches primarily in the ADR area, but has also taught Torts, Labor Law, and Administrative Law. Professor Cole has published articles in Washington University Law Review, U.C. Davis Law Review, Houston Law Review, BYU Law Review, Georgia Law Review, Hastings Law Journal, the UNLV Law Review, and the Ohio State Journal on Dispute Resolution.

Professor Cole is co-author, with Professors Nancy H. Rogers, Craig McEwen, Jim Coben, and Peter Thompson of Mediation: Law, Policy and Practice (3d. ed. 2011), the leading treatise in the field of mediation, and co-author with Nancy H. Rogers, Frank Sander and Stephen Goldberg of Dispute Resolution: Negotiation, Mediation and Other Processes (7th ed. 2020), one of the leading dispute resolution casebooks in the country. In 2020, she published with Oxford University Press, Discussions in Dispute Resolution, with Andrea Schneider and Art Hinshaw, eds. The book won the 2022 CPR Outstanding Book in the Field of ADR Award. Professor Cole’s article, entitled Arbitrator Diversity: Can It Be Achieved? won the 2022 CPR Award for Outstanding Professional Article.

She is a steering member of the Divided Community Project and is the Primary Investigator on University Collaboration on Overcoming Attitudinal and Situational Barriers to Collaborative Initiatives to Advance Racial Equity: A Confluence of Dispute Process Design, Law & Social Science which was awarded a President's Research Excellence (PRE) CatalystGrant. The grant supports empirical research designed to better understand the use of Truth and Reconciliation Commissions in the United States.

In 2019, she was named Michael E. Moritz Chair in Alternative Dispute Resolution and was previously the John W. Bricker Professor of Law.  In 2012, she also received the Alumni Award for Distinguished Teaching from the Ohio State University. In 2006, she became Director of the Program on Dispute Resolution.

She is a member of the American Law Institute and is an American Bar Foundation Fellow. She is past chair of the Dispute Resolution Committee for the AALS and a regular speaker on ADR topics at national meetings. She has appeared on NPR, including the Ann Fisher show, and has been quoted in national publications including the Wall Street Journal, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, the Hill, and the Columbus Dispatch. She was a member of the academic advisory faculty that consulted with NCCUSL and the ABA regarding the drafting of the Uniform Mediation Act.

She is a member of the Fulbright Specialist Roster and taught Comparative Dispute Resolution at the Universite of Paris 2 in March 2022.

She is also on the panel of arbitrators for AAA, CPR, OCB, OCSEA, FINRA, OSTA, and SERB in Ohio.