Founder, National Center for Technology and Dispute Resolution
Professor Emeritus of Legal Studies, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Co-author (with Orna Rabinovich-Einy) of Digital Justice: Technology and the Internet of Disputes (2017, Oxford University Press)
Recipient of  2017 D’Alemberte-Raven Award  from the American Bar Association Section of Dispute Resolution

Ethan Katsh is Professor Emeritus of Legal Studies at the University of Massachusetts. With Janet Rifkin, he established and, for many years, directed the National Center for Technology and Dispute Resolution. The Center (odr.info) continues to be the primary focal point of online and offline activities involving Online Dispute Resolution (ODR).  Professor Katsh is considered to be the founder of the field of ODR.

In his first book, The Electronic Media and the Transformation of Law (Oxford University Press, 1989)  and in his 1995 book Law in a Digital World (Oxford University Press) he was the first to discuss how deeply new information technologies would impact not only legal doctrines and rules of law but would shape broad changes to the rule of law itself. Law, it was argued, was an institution that relied on processing and communicating information and would, therefore, be deeply affected by the new media. A review in the New York Times found it

“an absorbing book, evocative and optimistic. The warning it contains should not be missed, however: law’s boundaries reflect our shared cultural values, but what we value depends on what we permit ourselves to know. Let us hope that it is not the ‘global village’ of market-informed circuitry alone that carries us forward, but compassionate reflection on the intimacy for which it is the metaphor.”

A decade later, he co-directed the eBay Online Dispute Resolution Project that led to eBay’s current system that handles over sixty million disputes each year. In 2001, with Professor Janet Rifkin, he wrote Online Dispute Resolution: Resolving Conflicts in Cyberspace (John Wiley, 2001), the first book about ODR. The often referred to metaphor of technology as the “Fourth Party” originated in this book (2001).

Professor Katsh is a graduate of the Yale Law School. His articles have appeared in the Yale Law Journal, the University of Chicago Legal Forum, and many other law reviews and legal periodicals. In recent yeas, he co-edited Online Dispute Resolution: Theory and Practice (Eleven International Publishing, 2nd ed., 2021)  and, with Orna Rabinovich-Einy, published  Digital Justice: Technology and the Internet of Disputes (Oxford University Press, 2017). 

During 2010-2011, Professor Katsh served as the Fulbright Distinguished Chair in the Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Haifa. In 2014-2015, Professor Katsh was appointed an Affiliate of Harvard University’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. He has been Visiting Professor of Law and Cyberspace at Brandeis University and in 2025 was appointed a Senior Fellow of the University of Haifa Center for Law and Technology  Professor Katsh received the University of Massachusetts Chancellor’s Medal and gave the UMass distinguished faculty lecture. In 2017, he received the D’Alemberte-Raven Award  from the American Bar Association Section of Dispute Resolution, the Section’s most prestigious award.

In 2014, Professor Katsh served as principal online dispute resolution consultant for the US Office of Government Information Services (OGIS), a federal agency mandated to provide mediation in Freedom of Information Act disputes. He has also advised the National Mediation Board in its resolution of airline and railroad disputes and assisted an internet start-up, SquareTrade, in its development of software that has resolved many millions of disputes. From 2004 – 2010, Professor Katsh was co-Principal Investigator, with several computer science faculty of three National Science Foundation funded projects to model processes of online dispute resolution. This work was coordinated with the United States National Mediation Board. His current research interests involve both the resolution and prevention of disputes involving electronic medical records and identifying new paradigms in how to respond to the rapidly growing numbers of disputes generated by AI.

Recent publications

• Katsh, Schwartz and Rabinovich-Einy, “AI and the Future of Disputing: Naming, Blaming, Claiming, and Preventing,” 43 Conflict Resolution Quarterly 79, Fall, 2025, https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/crq.21477
• Ethan Katsh, “Comments on Artificikal Intelligence,” International Journal on Online Dispute Resolution (2022)
• Wing, Martinez, Katsh and Rule, “Designing Ethical Online Dispute Resolution Systems: The Rise of the Fourth Party,” in Symposium and Artificial Intelligence, Technology and Dispute Resolution, Negotiation Journal  (2021) p. 97
• Daniel Rainey, Ethan Katsh and Mohamed Abdul Wahab, Online Dispute Resolution: Theory and Practice (2nd ed., 2021)
• Ethan Katsh & Colin Rule, “What We Know and Need to Know About Online Dispute Resolution,” 67 S.C. L. REV. 329  (2016) 
• Mohamed Wahab and Ethan Katsh, ““Revolutionizing Technologies and the Use of Technology in International Arbitration: Innovation, Legitimacy, Prospects, and Challenges” in Piers and Aschauer, Arbitration in the Digital Age: The Brave New World of Arbitration (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press) 2018)
• Orna Rabinovich-Einy and Ethan Katsh, “Blockchain and the Inevitability of Disputes,”  J. Disp. Resol. 47 (2019)
• Orna Rabinovich and Ethan Katsh, “Lawyers and Online Negotiation” Negotiator’s Desk Reference (2018)
• Ethan Katsh and Orna Rabinovich-Einy,“Digital Conflict and Digital Justice,” in Ian Macduff, ed.E Essays on Mediation: Dealing with Disputes in the 21^st Century (Wolters Kluwer, 2016)
• Orna Rabinovich-Einy and Ethan Katsh, “Access to digital justice: fair and efficient processes for the modern age,” Cardozoj,  J. Confict Resolution (2016)
• Orna Rabinovich-Einy and Ethan Katsh, “Technology and the future of dispute systems design” Harvard Negotiation. L. Rev. 17, 151 (2014
• “Is There An App For That? Electronic Health Records (EHRs) and A New Environment Of Conflict Prevention And Resolution,” 74 Law and Contemporary Problems 31 (2011)