Deborah Thompson Eisenberg is the associate dean for academic affairs and Piper & Marbury Professor of Law at the University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law, teaching in the areas of conflict resolution and civil procedure. She also serves as faculty director of the school’s nationally ranked Dispute Resolution Program and director of the Center for Dispute Resolution.
Eisenberg is a recognized scholar in the areas of dispute resolution, employment law, and equal pay. Her equal pay scholarship has been recognized in many national media outlets, including The New York Times, The Baltimore Sun, The Boston Globe, Salon.com, ands MSNBC.com. She has testified as a pay discrimination expert before the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and she has co-written peer-reviewed articles relating to the costs and benefits of court-annexed alternative dispute resolution.
Before joining academia, Eisenberg practiced complex civil litigation for more than 15 years. She was a partner at Brown, Goldstein & Levy LLP in Baltimore, with a practice focused on employment law. Prior to that, she served as director of the Appellate Advocacy Project and staff attorney at the Public Justice Center, litigating a variety of civil rights, wage and hour, and poverty law cases. She started her legal career at the Baltimore firm Ober Kaler (now known as Baker Donelson).
Eisenberg received her JD degree from Yale Law School in 1994 and graduated as the valedictorian with a bachelor’s degree in Political Science from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County in 1991.