Eileen Barkas Hoffman

Eileen B. Hoffman is a Senior Mediator (Commissioner) with the U.S. Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service (FMCS) in the Office of Conflict Mediation and Prevention (OCMP) and International Affairs. Ms. Hoffman is an adjunct professor at the George Washington University Law School, teaching courses in alternative dispute resolution and negotiations as well as a graduate course in Collective Bargaining at the Organizational Sciences and Communications Department of GWU’s Columbian School. She developed this ADR skills and survey course in 1996 has and has made numerous improvements to it.

As an adjunct faculty member, Ms. Hoffman has used her network of contacts in the ADR field to invite a number of experts to discuss their skills and approaches with the class. These individuals, ranging from mediators and arbitrators to government executives, and lawyers using the ADR process., have also consented to be interviewed by several students as part of their final papers. The course makes use of role plays, exercises, and videos of actual and simulated ADR processes. At an early GW graduation ceremony, for her service to GW, she was selected by the law school and its students for recognition as an excellent teacher.

Ms. Hoffman has extensive ADR practical experience, having mediated numerous complex individual employment workplace and collective bargaining labor disputes, public policy disputes, and discrimination complaints during her 47 years with FMCS. At FMCS, she progressed through the mediator ranks” in 1975, to become a district director in 1985, a special assistant and then as General Counsel of the agency and Director of Legislative Affairs in 1981. In Ms. Hoffman's legal capacity, she represented the federal agency concerning all legal matters and in her Legislative Affairs capacity, she testified before the Senate Committee considering the passage of the Administrative Dispute Resolution Act of 1990 (later amended in 1996) which required all federal agencies to examine their roles and functions to see where the ADR process could be most effective.

Prior to joining FMCS, Ms. Hoffman served as a research specialist at The Conference Board, Inc. in New York City and as Research Director for the Massachusetts Labor Relations Commission in Boston, MA. She is a graduate (BS) from Cornell University’s New York State School of Industrial and Labor Relations in June 1969 and earned an MA from Columbia University’s Graduate Faculties in political science in 1971, and a JD from the Georgetown University School of Law (GULC) in 1987 where she was awarded the John F. Kennedy Labor Law award.