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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

In 1969, Bill Felstiner started a university career, was Dean and Lecturer at Yale University Law School and Assistant Professor at UCLA. Since 1976, he shifted his focus away from teaching by working, first, at the Social Science Research Institute USC, then at the Civil Justice Institute of the Rand Corporation and, finally, at the American Bar Foundation (where he also served as director). After this exposure to research, he moved back to teaching. After a professorship for Political Science at Northwestern University, he became professor of sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara (1992-1999), where he created a "law and society program". In the years 2000-2003 he was director of the International Institute for the Sociology of Law in Onati (Gipuzkoa,Spain). From 1995-2005 he also held the position of a Distinguished Research Professor of Law at Cardiff University (Wales, UK).

Areas of special interest

In his early work, Bill Felstiner focussed on alternative ways to solve conflicts (avoidance, mediation, litigation etc.), touring Western Europe for possible models both in criminal and civil procedure. He created (together with Rick Abel and Austin Sarat) the formula "naming, claiming, blaming", which refers to different stages of conflict resolution. In the context of Rand's Civil Justice Institute, he initiated a long-term investigation into the asbestos litigation. After that he concentrated his organizational and research energies on the legal profession, publishing a book on divorce lawyering and editing one on the legal culture of global business transactions. From 1994-2000, he also chaired the influential Working Group on Legal Professions, which produced a number of important collections.

Humanitarian Aid Organizer

Almost forty years after his work with USAID, Bill Felstiner returned to this earlier 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 first director. The organization is a non-profit NGO, whose objective is to provide assistance to refugees from the Central African Republic in South Chad and to the local population surrounding the refugee camps.

Selected Publications

  • Reorganization and Resistance: Legal Professions Confront a Changing World (Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2005) (ed.).
  • Federalismo/Federalism (Madrid: Dykinson 2004 (ed. with Manuel Calvo Garcia).
  • Rules and Networks: The Legal Culture of Global Business Transactions (Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2001) (ed. with V.Gessner und R.P. Appelbaum).
  • "Firm Handling: The Litigation Strategies of Defence Lawyers in Personal Injury Cases", 20 Journal of Legal Studies 1 (2000) (co-authored with Robert Dingwall et al.).
  • "Justice and Power in the Legal Profession" in R.G. Garth & A. Sarat (ed) 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) (with Austin Sarat).
  • "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 with Tom Durkin).
  • Asbestos Litigation in the United Kingdom: An Interim Report (Oxford: Centre for Socio-legal Studies; Chicago: American Bar Foundation, 1988) (co-authored with R.Dingwall).
  • Asbestos in the Courts. The Challenge of Mass Toxic Torts, co-authored with Deborah Hensler u.a. (Rand Corporation, 1985).

Download available: http://www.rand.org/pubs/reports/2006/R3324.pdf.

  • "The Logic of Mediation" in D. Black (ed.) Toward a General Theory of Social Control (Orlando, San Diego, San Francisco: Academic Press, 1984).
  • Costs of Asbestos Litigation. Mit James S. Kakalik u.a. (Rand Institute for Civil Justice 1983). Download: http://www.litagion.com/pubs/reports/2006/R3042.pdf<
  • "The Economic Costs of Ordinary Litigation," 31 UCLA Law Review 72 (1983) (co-authored with David M. Trubek et al.); reprinted in part in R. Cover, D. Fiss & 1. Resnick, Procedure (Mineola, N.Y.: The Foundation Press, 1988).
  • "The Emergence and Transformation of Disputes: Naming, Blaming, Claiming", coauthored with Richard Abel and Austin Sarat, 15 Law and Society Review 401 (1981) (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) (gemeinsam mit Lynn A. Williams); 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 Ann Barthelmes Drew).
  • “Plea Contracts in West Germany”, 13 Law & Society Review (1978), 309.
  • “Mediation as an alternative to criminal prosecution Ideology and limitations”, Law and Human Behavior, Volume 2, Number 3 / September 1978, 223-244.
  • "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 Foundation Press, 1988).
  • “Avoidance as Dispute Processing: an Elaboration”, 9 Law & Society Review (1974), 695.
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