Lawrence E. Susskind (born January 12, 1947) is a scholar of conflict resolution and consensus-building in urban planning. He is one of the founders of the field of public dispute mediation and is a practicing international mediator through the Consensus Building institute. He has taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology since 1971, where he is Ford Professor of Environmental Planning.

In 1993, Susskind founded the Consensus Building Institute (CBI), a Cambridge-based not-for-profit that is now a leading mediation service provider. Through CBI, he has advised the Supreme Courts of Israel, Ireland, and the Philippines; helped to facilitate a variety of international treaty-making efforts; developed the techniques of conflict assessment and joint fact-finding; evaluated collaborative adaptive management efforts; and created new strategies for building organizational negotiating capabilities. In addition to his appointment at MIT, he has been part of the inter-university Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School since 1982.

Personal life Susskind was born with a prominent vascular birthmark (of the naevus flammeus aka "port-wine stain" variety) on his right cheek. He grew up in New York City and in 1983 married Leslie Tuttle. They raised their two children in Southborough, MA where Susskind created the Southborough Open Land Foundation. They currently live in Cambridge, MA.

Academic career Susskind received his BA from Columbia University in 1968. At MIT, he earned a Master of City Planning and a PhD in Urban and Regional Planning. In 1971, he joined the faculty in MIT's Department of Urban Studies and Planning and subsequently served as assistant head and head of the Department. He created MIT's Environmental Policy and Planning Group, and since 1995 has held the title of Ford Professor of Urban and Environmental Planning. As a professor at MIT he has supervised 60 doctoral students and over 100 Master's students.

In 1983 he became the first Executive Director of the interuniversity Program on Negotiation (PON) at Harvard Law School, which he co-founded with Roger Fisher (Harvard Law School), Howard Raiffa (Harvard Business School), Frank Sander (Harvard Law School), Robert McKersie (MIT's Sloan School of Management), and Jeffrey Z. Rubin (The Fletcher School at Tufts University). Through PON, Susskind has helped to produce over 100 role-play simulation teaching exercises, teaching videos, and other pedagogical supports used internationally, including The Young Negotiator Program for middle schools, Workable Peace for high school students, and exercises taught at the most advanced graduate student levels.PON Clearinghouse , MIT Science Impact Collaborative. See also Susskind, Mnookin, Boyd and Rozdeiczer, Teaching Multiparty Negotiation: A workbook, published by the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School, 2007. At PON he is currently Vice Chair for Education and co-director of the Negotiation Pedagogy Initiative.

Along with Herman Karl from the United States Geological Survey, Susskind established the MIT Science Impact Collaborative in 2003 to train "science impact coordinators"—multidisciplinary professionals with a background in science who can work at the intersection of science, policy, and politics. Based at MIT, the Science Impact Collaborative program trains graduate students who apprentice for two years as part of their graduate studies and assist public and not-for-profit agencies involved in natural resource management. The Science Impact Collaborative has established a way of applying consensus building in a wide range of resource management situations.

He is director of the MIT-Harvard Public Disputes Program that has made the case for mediated approaches to international treaty-making and worked to support the land claims of indigenous peoples throughout the world. He has held visiting professor appointments at Harvard Law School, Stanford Law School, University of Hawaii, University of California-Berkeley, European University Institute, and elsewhere. He has been a visiting lecturer at more than 50 universities in 20 countries.

He and his fellow professors offer multiple training sessions each year to interested participants. He offers sessions such as Senior Executive Program on Negotiation, Negotiation Master Class, Real Estate Negotiation, Dealing with an Angry Public, Water Diplomacy Workshop and many more. His expertise in these areas of study allow him to offer innovative information to the public that would not normally have access to his teachings.

Public Dispute Mediation

United States Mediation as a tool for public decision-making emerged in the 1970s.The Evolution of Public Policy Resolution (with Sarah McKearnan). Journal of Architecture and Planning Research, Volume 16, Number 2, Summer 1999. In the mid-1970s, Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis asked Susskind to help more than thirty agencies, companies and community groups reach a timely agreement on how to handle the environmental impacts of a proposed mass transit extension in Cambridge, Massachusetts.Citizen Participation and Consensus Building in Land Use Planning, Edited by Judy de Neufville. In The Land Use Policy Debate in America, Plenum Publishers, New York, 1981). He worked with the Kettering Foundation to facilitate a federal-state-local negotiated investment strategy for Columbus, Ohio.Report of the Negotiated Investment Strategy Project, The Negotiation Process (With Frank Keefe), The Agreement, A Negotiated Investment Strategy for Columbus, Ohio, May 1980). This was followed by efforts to reach accord in Maine on where to site a low level radioactive waste repository;Changing Perspectives on the Facility Siting Processes (with David Laws), In Maine Policy Review, Vol. 1, No. 1, December 1991) an appointment by New Jersey's highest court to settle a long-standing lawsuit regarding pollution clean-up in Camden (NJ) Harbor;Court-Appointed Masters as Mediators. In Negotiation Journal, Vol. 1, No. 4, October 1985 and work with the Massachusetts Energy Facility Siting Council that led to the creation of the Facility Siting Credo.Howard Kunreuther, Kevin Fitzgerald & Thomas D. Aarts, Siting Noxious Facilities: A Test of the Facility Siting Credo, 13 Risk Anal. 301 (1993). Susskind has mediated disputes in the health care field (a controversial decision to relocate the Veterans Hospital in Meriden, Connecticut; efforts to revise a labor contract between the nurses union and the University of Michigan medical system), the field of housing and community economic development (a regional effort to allocate "fair shares" of affordable housing in the Hartford, Connecticut metropolitan area;Affordable Housing Mediation: Building Consensus for Regional Agreements in the Hartford and Greater Bridgeport Areas. Lincoln Institute of Land Policy (With Susan L. Podziba), July 1990. resolution of growing tensions between elected neighborhood boards and the Honolulu city council); the field of public education (including a tense, racially based conflict over the drawing of school district boundaries in Rocky Mount, North Carolina); and in the environmental field, where he has mediated disputes over water allocation in Massachusetts, emission standards for a proposed solid waste incinerator in New York City,Mediating Scientific-Intensive Policy Disputes, (With Connie Ozawa). In Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, Vol. 5, No. 1, 1985. and clean-up of water contamination at a U.S. Department of Defense site in Massachusetts.Scher, Edward. 1999. "Negotiating Superfund Cleanup at Massachusetts Military Reservation." Pp. 859-878 in The Consensus Building Handbook, edited by Lawrence Susskind, Sarah McKearnan, and Jennifer Thomas-Larner. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Susskind was the originator of the idea of creating state offices of mediation, many of which are still in operation.Experiments in State-Wide Office of Mediation. In Dispute Resolution Forum, National Institute for Dispute Resolution, Washington, DC. December 1987. He played a role in the 2002 National Energy Policy Initiative (NEPI), undertaken with the Rocky Mountain Institute, which followed an effort a decade earlier to help win bi-partisan support for national energy strategy for the United States.The Role for Simulations in Public Policy Disputes: The Case of National Energy Policy, (With Eric Jay Dolin). In Simulation & Gaming, Vol. 23, No. 1, March 1992.http://www.nepinitiative.org/pdfs/NEPInit_AppxB.pdf, NEP Initiative Expert Group Report: Appendix B (with many constructive comments from all members of the CBI team). With Gregg Macey Susskind worked with the US Environmental Protection Agency to explore the use of consensus building approach to resolving environmental justice disputes. This included organizing workshops for the heads of EJ groups from all over the Southeastern United States.https://web.mit.edu/publicdisputes/book/epa.html, Prepared by Consensus Building Institute for the US EPA Office of Environmental Justice, 2003. and The Secondary Effects of Environmental Justice Litigation: The Case of West Dallas Coalition for Environmental Justice v. EPA (with Greg Macey) Virginia Environmental Law Journal, 20: 431-477. He assisted with the implementation of Project XL—a negotiated regulatory strategy of the Clinton Administration's aimed at demonstrating that a command-and-control approach could be replaced by a more informal facilitated dialogue and still ensure that air quality, water quality and other environmental mandates were met."Improving" Project XL: Helping Adaptive Management to Work Within EPA (with Joshua Secunda). UCLA Journal of Environmental Law and Policy, Vol 17, No. 2, 1998/99. Susskind was part of a multiyear effort to train the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (as part of ongoing leadership development) in the use of mediation and other forms of dispute resolution to resolve contract disputes. At the time the Corps was contracting for more than $10 billion annually and was caught up in lengthy litigation with many of its construction contractors. The training led to successful experiments with mediated dispute resolution.The following case studies were written for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Institute for Water, Alternative Dispute Resolution Series and are available for purchase from the National Technical Information Service (NTIS) at 1-800-553-6847. 1. Tennessee Tombigbee: Analysis of mini-trial used to settle a $55.6 million claim concerning the Tennessee Tombigbee Project -- a five-year, $270 million project to excavate an eleven mile stretch of the Tennessee Tombigbee Waterway. Co-authored with Lawrence Susskind and Eileen Babbitt. NTIS Number: ADA-224807. 2. Bechtel National, Inc.: Analysis of mini-trial used to settle a series of claims that totaled $21.2 million during construction of the Consolidated Space Operations Center in Colorado. Co-authored with Lawrence Susskind and Eileen Babbitt. NTIS Number: ADA-224818. 3. Granite Construction Company: Analysis of non-binding arbitration to settle a $1.7 million contract claim concerning the sand source used during the construction of the Aberdeen Lock and Dam of the Tennessee Tombigbee Waterway. Co-authored with Lawrence Susskind and Eileen Babbitt.