Robert A. Baruch Bush, is a Rains Distinguished Professor of Alternative Dispute Resolution at the Maurice A. Deane School of Law at Hofstra University  and the Co-Founder and Board Member at the Institute for the Study of Conflict Transformation.   

Professor Bush’s scholarship and teaching focuses on mediation and alternative dispute resolution. He is one of the originators of the “Transformative Approach” to mediation, as explained in his best-selling book, The Promise of Mediation (1994, 2d ed. 2005), co-authored with Dr. Joseph Folger and translated into six languages.

Bush has practiced, taught and written about mediation for over 40 years, authoring five books and more than thirty articles/chapters on mediation and ADR. His latest article is “Beyond the Toolbox: Value-Based Models of Mediation Practice”, published by Cardozo Journal of Conflict Resolution in 2023.  In 2017, Bush received (together with co-author and colleague Joseph Folger), the Association of Conflict Resolution’s “William Kreidler Award for Distinguished Service to the field of Conflict Resolution.” In 2022, he received the “L. Randolph Lowry Educator of the Year Award” from the Southern California Mediation Association. 

He is a graduate of Stanford Law School, where he was a member of the Order of the Coif, and of Harvard University, from which he graduated magna cum laude and where he was a member of Phi Beta Kappa. He also worked as a Research Fellow at the Center for Comparative Judicial Studies in Florence, Italy, and at Yale Law School.