About
Toby Susan Goldbach
Why this work
It took me many years to learn how to speak through conflict. I had to learn, almost from scratch, how to ask for what I wanted, hold a boundary, and stay connected to people when I felt uncertain and exposed. Years later, studying dispute resolution, I recognized those same skills being taught as the foundations of negotiation and mediation.
Only more recently did I begin to see conflict as part of the story — the force that moves the plot of a life, and of a working life. That is the conviction behind this work: conflict is a call, and the capacity to answer it is not a talent some people are born with. It is technique, and technique can be learned.
UBC Allard School of LawCornell Law SchoolOsgoode HallOntario Superior Court of JusticeNYU Press
Background
Toby Susan Goldbach is a law professor, dispute-resolution scholar, educator, mediator, and conflict advisor. She is an Assistant Professor at the Peter A. Allard School of Law at the University of British Columbia, where she teaches dispute resolution, legal ethics and professionalism, jurisprudence, and courses on courts and judging.
She holds a JSD from Cornell Law School, where she was the Rudolf B. Schlesinger Fellow in Comparative Law, an LLM specializing in Alternative Dispute Resolution, and a JD from Osgoode Hall Law School.
Before entering academia, she clerked at the Ontario Superior Court of Justice and served as Senior Law Clerk to Chief Justice Patrick LeSage. She worked as a research and policy lawyer with Ontario's Ministry of the Attorney General, and as a mediator, investigator, and complaints coordinator at the College of Nurses of Ontario, where she helped develop dispute-resolution processes for Canada's largest professional health regulator.
She is the author of The Institutional Judge (NYU Press, forthcoming) and scholarship on judicial reform, dispute resolution, legal transplants, class actions, and international judicial education.
Through Creative Conflict Leadership, she helps leaders make moral complexity usable — and meet difficult moments without sacrificing either integrity or agency.