Professor
Donna
Shestowsky
Donna Shestowsky is Senior Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and Professor of Law at the University of California, Davis, School of Law. She is also a faculty member of the Graduate Group in Psychology at UC Davis. She teaches Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR), Advanced Negotiation and Client Counseling, Lawyering Process, Negotiation Strategy, and the Seminar in Legal Psychology. Her main research objective is to examine basic assumptions underlying the structure of the legal system and to explore ways in which the legal system might be improved using the methodological and analytic tools of psychological theory and research.
Dr. Shestowsky was the sole principal investigator of a multi-year research project, funded by the National Science Foundation and the American Bar Association, which examined how litigants evaluate legal procedures. One article based on this work was awarded the 2016 Mangano Dispute Resolution Advancement Award; another article was awarded the Best Article of 2018 in the field of dispute resolution from the AALS Section on Alternative Dispute Resolution. In recognition of her scholarly contributions, she was awarded the Scholar Award by the Association of American Law Schools’ Section on Litigation in 2024.
Dr. Shestowsky's legal and psychological commentary has appeared in national sources such as CNN, NPR, and the New York Times. She advises courts in the development of court-connected ADR programs and provides negotiation education services to corporations, law firms, and national organizations. She also coaches the King Hall Negotiation team, which routinely places at the nationals in the ABA’s negotiation and client counseling competitions and ranked first in the world in the international law student negotiations competition. She was the 2007 recipient of the Distinguished Teaching Award.
Her research has been published in top journals in both Psychology and Law, including the Stanford Law Review, Law and Human Behavior, and the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. She is dedicated to helping legal practitioners make use of empirical research. To that end, she also publishes in journals with broader audiences, such as Court Review and Dispute Resolution Magazine.
Dr. Shestowsky was awarded a J.D. and Ph.D. in Psychology from Stanford University. During the 2003-2004 academic year, she was jointly appointed to the faculty at Northwestern University School of Law and the Kellogg School of Management. She was admitted to the Massachusetts bar in 2004. She was elected as a Fellow of the American Bar Foundation in 2021. In 2023 she served as Chair of the Association of American Law Schools’ Section on Alternative Dispute Resolution, and under her leadership, the section was honored with the award for Section of the Year.