Deborah Thompson Eisenberg is associate dean for academic affairs and Piper & Marbury Professor of Law. She serves as faculty director of Maryland Carey Law’s Dispute Resolution Program and Center for Dispute Resolution. Professor Eisenberg teaches in the areas of dispute resolution, mediation, and civil procedure. She received her JD from Yale Law School in 1994 and graduated as valedictorian with a BA in Political Science from the University of Maryland Baltimore County in 1991.
Professor Eisenberg is a recognized scholar in the areas of dispute resolution, employment law, and equal pay. She has published peer-reviewed articles relating to the costs and benefits of court-annexed ADR (with Lorig Charkoudian and Jamie Walter). Professor Eisenberg’s equal pay scholarship has been recognized in many national media outlets, including The New York Times, Salon.com, MSNBC.com, The Boston Globe, Baltimore Sun, and others. She has testified as a pay discrimination expert before the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
Professor Eisenberg serves as a mediator in employment discrimination and civil cases. Through the law school’s Center for Dispute Resolution, she provides professional trainings in negotiation, mediation, mediation ethics, restorative practices, managing workplace conflict, and other conflict resolution topics. Professor Eisenberg serves on the executive committee of the American Association of Law Schools Dispute Resolution Section and previously served as co-chair of the ADR Committee of the AALS Clinical Law Section.
Prior to academia, Professor Eisenberg practiced complex civil litigation for more than 15 years. She was a partner at Brown, Goldstein & Levy, LLP in Baltimore, with a practice focused on employment law. Prior to that, she served as director of the Appellate Advocacy Project and staff attorney at the Public Justice Center, litigating a variety of civil rights, wage and hour, and poverty law cases. She started her legal career at the Baltimore firm Ober Kaler (now Baker Donelson).