“In polarizing times constructive dialogue is a must-have.” This is what my friend and former DOJ colleague Grande Lum wrote to me. No one knows this better than he does.

Grande was the Director of DOJ’s Community Relations Service from 2012 to 2016. He was nominated by President Obama and confirmed unanimously by the Senate. Currently a professor at Stanford Law School, he focuses on negotiation and mediation. He was also a senior partner in the Rebuild Congress Initiative at the Harvard Negotiation Project. He is a graduate of the University of California at Berkeley and Harvard Law School.

Grande understands the importance of civil discourse. The Community Relations Service, as you’ll learn in his interview below, was created by Congress to act as peacekeepers when issues, starting with those involved in implementing new civil rights measures in the 1960s, cause tensions to boil over in our communities.

In April 2025, there were rumblings that the Trump administration was considering closing the Service. Concerned about that, Grande and I discussed the importance of making people aware of CRS’s work, and decided to do this edition of Five Questions, which we completed before the shut down, and when the idea of doing away with CRS entirely seemed less likely. But, on September 30, 2025, the Trump administration shut it down.