Markham Ball – Senior Fellow, International Law Institute; Director of the Institute’s International Arbitration and Alternative Dispute Resolution Programs

As a lawyer in private practice in Washington, D.C., Markham Ball for the past 20 years has lectured regularly on international commercial arbitration in ILI courses in Washington. He developed, and since 1997 he has conducted, the annual program in international commercial arbitration of ILI’s Centre of Legal Excellence in Kampala, Uganda. Upon his retirement from the international law firm of Holland & Knight LLP in 2002, Mr. Ball has taken over direction of ILI’s worldwide program of arbitration and ADR.

In a career in the private practice of law spanning more than 40 years, Mr. Ball has specialized in domestic and international arbitration and other forms of ADR, and in international contracts and international development projects. He has also held various positions in public service, including law clerk to Chief Justice Earl Warren and retired Justices Stanley Reed and Harold Burton, Supreme Court of the United States (1960-61); Assistant General Counsel, Office of Economic Opportunity (1964-66); and General Counsel, U.S. Agency for International Development (1977-79).

Mr. Ball is active as an arbitrator in international and domestic arbitrations. He has served as arbitrator under the rules of the American Arbitration Association, the International Chamber of Commerce, the CPR Institute for Dispute Resolution and other institutions, as well as under the UNCITRAL Rules. He has taught international commercial arbitration at the University of Virginia Law School (1991-2001) and at the Georgetown University Law Center (2002- ). He has spoken on international commercial arbitration and related subjects in numerous other forums in the U.S. and other countries, and has published extensively. In addition Mr. Ball currently serves as a consultant to governments of a number of developing countries on the drafting of modern arbitration and mediation statutes and the implementation of national arbitration and mediation regimes.

Mr. Ball holds degrees from Amherst College (1956); Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar (1958); and Harvard Law School (1960).

Melinda Ostermeyer has almost 20 years experience mediating, training mediators, designing mediation programs in the U.S. and abroad, and in administering dispute resolution programs in the U.S. She is a conflict management and organization development consultant, specializing in designing conflict management systems for foreign justice systems and governmental and private U.S. based organizations.