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Bill Felstiner

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William L.F. Felstiner (* December 14, 1929), usually known as Bill Felstiner, is an internationally renowned socio-legal scholar. He also is an avid sierra explorer, mountain climber and relief activist. With his wife Gray he has two sons.

Education and Early Career

Bill Felstiner received his LL.D. from Yale University in 1958. Before Law School he spent three years in the U.S. Navy, as an Operations Officer on the USS Sturtevant. Following his Law Doctorate, he went into legal practice as an associate and later partner of the New Haven Law Firm Tyler, Cooper and Alcom (1958-1965). He was then hired as a Regional Legal Advisor of the US AID Mission to Greece & Turkey and in due course appointed Assistant Director of the US AID Mission to India (until 1968).

Teaching and Research

After teaching law at Yale (1969) and UCLA (1972), Bill Felstiner soon became more interested to study the practice of law from the outside. In 1976, he started to work at the Social Science Research Institute of the USC, g. In 1981, he moved to the Rand Corporation, where his research centered on Asbestos litigation. He also spent one year (1985/86) as a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies, Wolfson College, Oxford University. From 1986 to 1990, he was director of the American Bar Foundation, with his research focussing on the legal professions. After holding an adjunct professorship of political science at Northwestern University, he became professor of Sociology/Law and Society at the University of California, Santa Barbara (1992-1999). From 1995 to 2005, he was also Distinguished Research Professor of Law at the University of Cardiff (Wales, UK).

International Sociology of Law

With his background as a scholar, administrator and man of the world, Bill Felstiner became an important actor for establishing socio-legal studies as a transnational project. In 1991, (together with Erhard Blankenburg) he chaired in Amsterdam a joint conference by the Law and Society Association (LSA) and the Research Committee on Sociology of Law (RCSL), which brought together American and European scholars working in this field. From 1994-1997 he served as secretary to the RCSL and chaired (from 1994-1999) its largest working group, the WG on Legal Professions. After teaching for a number of years at the International Institute for the Sociology of Law (IISL) in Oñati, (Spain), he served as its Scientific Director (from 2000-2003), taking turns with Manuel Calvo Garcia (University of Zaragoza).

Relief Organizer

Early in his career, in 1965, he left the United States to become Regional Legal Advisor of the US AID Mission to Greece & Turkey. This was followed up by his being appointed Assistant Director of the US AID Mission to India (until 1968). Almost forty years later, he returned to this vocation. During the Katrina disaster in 2005, he volunteered and worked as a relief worker in and around New Orleans. In 2007 he founded, together with colleagues from Santa Barbara Chad Relief (CRF) and became its director. The organization is a non-profit NGO, whose objective it is to provide assistance to refugees from the Central African Republic in South Chad and to the local population surrounding the refugee camps.


Bibliography

  • Reorganization and Resistance: Legal Professions Confront a Changing World (Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2005) (ed.).
  • Federalismo/Federalism (Madrid: Dykinson 2004 (co-ed. with Manuel Calvo Garcia).
  • Rules and Networks: The Legal Culture of Global Business Transactions (Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2001) (co-ed.).
  • "Firm Handling: The Litigation Strategies of Defence Lawyers in Personal Injury Cases", 20 Legal Studies 1 (2000) (co-authored).
  • "Justice and Power in the Legal Profession" in RG. Garth & A. Sarat (eds.) Justice and Power in Sociolegal Studies (Evanston: Northwestem University Press, 1998).
  • "Professional Inattention: Origins and Consequences" in K. Hawkins (ed.) The Human Face ofLaw (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).
  • Divorce Lawyers and Their Clients: Power and Meaning in the Legal Process (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995) (co-authored).
  • "Bad Arithmetic: Disaster Litigation as Less than the Sum of Its Parts" in Sheila Jasanoff(ed.), Learning from Disaster (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994) (co-authored).
  • Asbestos Litigation in the United Kingdom: An Interim Report (Oxford: Centre for Socio-legal Studies; Chicago: American Bar Foundation, 1988) (co-authored).
  • "The Economic Costs of Ordinary Litigation," 31 UCLA Law Review 72 (1983) (co-authored); reprinted in part in R. Cover, D. Fiss & 1. Resnick, Procedure (Mineola, N.Y.: The Foundation Press, 1988).
  • Asbestos in the Courts. The Challenge of Mass Toxic Torts (??: Rand Corporation, 1985).
  • "The Logic of Mediation" in D. Black (ed.) Toward a General Theory of Social Control (Orlando, San Diego, San Francisco: Academic Press, 1984).
  • "The Emergence and Transformation of Disputes: Naming, Blaming, Claiming", 15 Law and Society Review 401 (1981) (co-authored Richard Abel and Austin Sarat); reprinted in John J. Bonsignore et al. (eds.) Before the Law: An Introduction to the Legal Process (Boston: Houghton¬Mifflin, 4th ed., 1989).
  • Community Mediation in Dorchester. Massachusetts (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1980) (co-authored); reprinted in R. Tomasic and M. Feeley, Neighborhood Justice (New York: Longman, 1982) and in S. Goldberg, E. Green and F. Sander, Dispute Resolution (New York: Little Brown,1985).
  • European Alternatives to Criminal Trials and their Applicability in the United States (Washington: National Institute of Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice, 1978) (co-authored with ).
  • "Influences of Social Organization on Dispute Processing," 9 Law and Society Review 63 (1974); reprinted in L. Friedman & S. Macaulay, Law and the Behavioral Sciences (2d ed., New York: Bobbs Merrill, 1977); in R. Cover & O. Fiss, The Structure of Procedure (Mineola, N.Y.: The Foundation Press, 1979); in R. Tomasic & M. Feeley, Neighborhood Justice (New York: Longman, 1982); and in R. Cover, O. Fiss & J. Resnick, Procedure (Mineola, N.Y.: The Fourtdation Press, 1988).
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