The Place of Mediation: New Interview with Peter Salem

by Peter Salem
March 2019

Peter Salem Interview

Recorded by Robert Benjamin on February 26, 2019

Peter Salem has been with the Association of Family and Conciliation Courts (AFCC) since 1994, first as the Associate Director and since 2002, as the Executive Director. He has been instrumental in facilitating the discussion of important and sometimes controversial issues in the delivery of legal, therapeutic, mediation and other conflict management modes regarding divorce and family issues. He is also a co-editor with Jay Folberg and Ann Milne of the Family and Divorce Mediation: Models Techniques and Applications (2004), and the recipient of the John Haynes Distinguished Mediator Award from the Association for Conflict Resolution (ACR). He poignantly observes about his career that:

"Had I written about the future of family dispute resolution in the late 1980's, when I was a young and enthusiastic child custody mediator ....I would probably have focused exclusively on mediation instead of considering the current broad spectrum of family dispute resolution (FDR) processes that I did not anticipate at the time."

Biography

Peter Salem has served as executive director of the Association of Family and Conciliation Courts since 2002 and as associate director from 1994-2002. He was a William T. Grant Foundation Distinguished Fellow (2009-2012), working with the Arizona State University Center for Prevention Research to promote effective use of high quality social science in family law. Mr. Salem taught mediation at Marquette Law School and was mediator and director of Mediation Family Court Services in Rock County Wisconsin. He has conducted training and technical assistance for family court service agencies throughout the United States for the last 20 years and has spearheaded several family court reform initiatives. He is co-editor of the book Divorce and Family Mediation: Models, Techniques and Applications (Guilford, 2004) and was the recipient of the Association for Conflict Resolution’s John Haynes Distinguished Mediator Award in 2008.

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