by Tanishk Goyal LL.M. ’25
On September 5, 2025, National Teachers’ Day was celebrated by Indians across the globe. For a billion Indians, it was a day to pause and honour those who have shaped the way we think, act, and evolve. For me, looking back, my LL.M year at Harvard Law School stands out as a chapter that most profoundly reshaped the way I think, act and perceive the world around me. When I sat to interrogate this chapter, I realised that one of my greatest teachers has not been one person in the conventional sense, but an experience. This experience was the Dispute Systems Design (DSD) Clinic at Harvard Law.
More than an academic commitment, the Clinic became a teacher of life skills. It taught me patience, courage, and the humility to listen before speaking. It showed me that systems are never just about rules on paper, but about people, their conflicts, and their aspirations. The lessons I carry from this experience are not confined to the classroom. They are lessons in faith, resilience, and leadership that I continue to employ as an Advocate upon my return to India.
Today, when I recognise that the law is, at its heart, about people and relationships, I want to take this opportunity to reflect on how this realization came to be, what shaped it, and what nurtured it in the hope that this insight remains relevant to posterity.
For an unsuspecting LL.M. candidate from India, the DSD Clinic began as a course that spoke of abstract concepts about systems, processes and structures. As time passed, this course, surprisingly enough, grew into something far more personal. As a part of our course, we were required to design our own protocols, interview people, and then make a report on how seed systems in Somalia can be strengthened to alleviate conflict and create seed sovereignty for the indigenous community of farmers there. This mandate was not just heavy logistically but emotionally as well. Two interviews into the course, I realised that my conversations with people, and the way I extract information from them is reflective of my own inhibitions, insecurities, assumptions and lived experiences. Juxtaposing my conversations with that of my team, I realised that there is a great deal to unlearn first, before I could go about learning how to dance with the systems of an uncharted territory.
Lessons on Faith
Somalia faces challenges of internal conflict, non-state armed groups, and governance gaps. As such, the first thing to unlearn was second-guessing our positionalities. Our instructors, our institutions, our clients, and our partners had reposed faith in us. Perhaps, DSD is about faith. Faith in people, faith in process, and faith that change, however slow, is possible.
The second thing was to realise that our lack of faith in conflict resolution is often a function of our upbringings and lived experiences. The chaff had to be separated from the grain. I first entered this course with a formalistic and position-based understanding of conflict. I thought about systems in terms of procedures, actors, and written law. But DSD taught me that the heart of any system is not structure, but people. And people have interests which, however divergent or polarizing, often stem from needs that can be reconciled and the faith that they will be reconciled.
I was 24 years old when I completed this project. And yet, I was entrusted with charting out a document that might influence the policies of a state and contribute to the programming of a UN agency. This was humbling, but also revealing. DSD is not about having all the answers. It is about having faith in the process. We, as a team, placed our faith in our own resilience, and in the lived experience and expertise of our interviewees. Many of them were community leaders, local NGO and civil society representatives, Somali researchers, Somali academics, and others who were all exceptionally busy addressing pressing challenges, who still found time to share with us their hopes, grievances, and insights. That collective effort produced something larger than any one of us—a systems map and report that may someday seed peace in a place that has known little of it.
Lessons on Incrementalism
One of the most powerful metaphors shared in class was that conflict is like eating an elephant. You cannot do it all at once. You must take it piece by piece. Incrementalism is not failure. It is progress. Nowhere was this more evident than in our Somalia seed resilience project. We worked on designing a seed access and peacebuilding system in a fragile context with a number of information gaps and non-aligned interests. However, despite that, our faith in incremental progress was relentless.
We underpinned this faith through our identification of “bridge actors.” These “bridge actors” are essentially stakeholders who, though not at the extremes of power or vulnerability, held the potential to mediate conflict, foster trust, and implement change related to seed access and distribution—this change that would be uncertain and slow given that these actors cannot unilaterally implement, but bridging between powerful and vulnerable groups may create more long-standing, stable systems for seed sovereignty.
Resigning ourselves to incrementalism was a process that embodied the famous lines from Lord of the Rings: “There is some good in this world, Mr. Frodo, and it’s worth fighting for.” And it did pay off. Local community leaders, educational institutions, and international NGOs emerged as vital connectors between vulnerable groups and powerful players. And recently, our final report was presented in Mogadishu by UN IOM, the City University of Mogadishu, and the Heritage Institute at an event hosted by Somalia’s Minister of Agriculture and attended by over 70 participants, including from the Somali government and seed companies. During the event, multiple members of the government and seed sector made public commitments to preserve indigenous seeds and traditional seed practices, marking a positive departure from concerning regional trends towards restriction. The report launch aligned with the opening of Somalia’s first National Seed Bank, in which indigenous seeds will be preserved, shared, and celebrated.
Lessons on Curiosity
The DSD clinic has also opened me up to questions I didn’t know I needed to ask. I have now returned home to India, a country of democratic aspiration and procedural challenges. And I know that disputes are ubiquitous. So too must be dispute systems. If DSD can help design peace in Somalia, why can it not help address docket explosions in the Indian Supreme Court? Or the inefficiencies in our listing procedures? At its core, any procedural inefficiency is a dispute between stakeholders and the system. And one year at Harvard has taught me that all disputes are designable.
But I am also aware that the public morality of my home is fundamentally different from that of the place where I have been trained. This brings me to the deeper, moral questions I continue to hold. What happens when my idea of “good design” does not align with local norms? Should I insist on the universal principles of fairness and efficiency I have learned here, or must I do as the Romans do in Rome? Can my training in DSD teach me to dance with local systems, rather than overwrite them? And most curiously, can DSD bleed into my personal life—can it help me build the routines of my home, my law firm, my future relationships? These are questions I do not yet have full answers to. However, I know that I should be asking these questions.
My Final Takeaways
If I were to locate myself on the framework of Movers, Objectors, and Bystanders, I can say with confidence that I entered this course very much as a Bystander. I listened, I observed, and I understood frameworks in the abstract. But when I left Harvard and the United States, I left as a Mover. I have not only participated in system design but helped build one in a context I once knew very little about. If that is not the story of evolution, I wonder what is. I now understand what it means to create momentum, to spark thought in otherwise stagnant rooms, and to align process with possibility. But if this course has taught me anything, it is that some of the most meaningful journeys are those that begin in uncertainty. Disputes will not stop. Systems will not fix themselves. But now I know that I have the tools to intervene—gently, thoughtfully, and with faith.
Perhaps, that is what I would say to anyone taking this course at Harvard Law School. Leave this course not with conclusions, but with lessons on faith, incrementalism, curiosity and commitment. Lessons on process. Lessons about design. And above all, lessons about people.
