Nicolás Parra-Herrera

Nicolás Parra-Herrera is a doctoral candidate (S.J.D.) at Harvard Law School (HLS). He is also a Visiting Professor at Universidad de los Andes, Colombia, where he teaches courses on Dispute Resolution: Negotiation, Mediation, Dispute System Design, Leadership, and Digitizing Justice. He was a former graduate fellow in the Negotiation Program at HLS and a visiting researcher at Pennsylvania State University. 

Nicolas has published books and papers on alternative dispute resolution (ADR), private law, legal history, and legal philosophy. Among his works, he has written “A Road Not Taken in ADR: Mary Parker Follett and the Emergence of Proto-ADR” forthcoming in the Ohio State Journal of Dispute Resolution and recipient of the 2024 Roger Fisher and Frank E.A. Sander Prize at Harvard Law School. He co-authored with Dan Rohde, “Law as Architecture: Mapping Contingency and Autonomy in Twentieth-Century Legal Historiography,” published in the Journal of Law and Political Economy (2023), and published “Three Approaches to Proportionality in American Legal Thought: A Genealogy” in the book Proportionality in Private Law, edited by the Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law (2023).  He also co-authored with M.I.T. Professor Lawrence Susskind and Canadian Justice (ret.) William Tilleman the book “Judicial Dispute Resolution: New Roles for Judges in Ensuring Justice” (2023). 

Nicolas teaches and coaches courses on leadership, ethics, and moral practice at Harvard Kennedy School, where received the “Dean’s Award for Excellence in Student Teaching.” He was part of the teaching team that designed and taught the first adaptive leadership course for lawyers. 

Before his doctoral studies, he clerked at the Colombian Constitutional Court and worked in litigation, arbitration, and corporate law at two law firms in Colombia. Nicolas completed his magna cum laude B.A. in Law and Philosophy and cum laude M.A. in Philosophy at Universidad de los Andes. 

Nicolas co-produces with Professor Jorge González-Jácome the first podcast in Spanish on Law, Film, and Humanities, El Derecho por fuera del Derecho.