Bill Felstiner
Encyclopedia
William L.F. Felstiner usually known as Bill Felstiner, is an internationally renowned socio-legal scholar. With his wife Gray he has two sons.

Education and early career

Bill Felstiner was born in New York, and graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy
Phillips Exeter Academy
Phillips Exeter Academy is a private secondary school located in Exeter, New Hampshire, in the United States.Exeter is noted for its application of Harkness education, a system based on a conference format of teacher and student interaction, similar to the Socratic method of learning through asking...

 and Yale College
Yale College
Yale College was the official name of Yale University from 1718 to 1887. The name now refers to the undergraduate part of the university. Each undergraduate student is assigned to one of 12 residential colleges.-Residential colleges:...

. He received his LL.B. from Yale University
Yale University
Yale University is a private, Ivy League university located in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701 in the Colony of Connecticut, the university is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States...

 in 1958. In 1965, he was hired as Regional Legal Advisor of the USAID Mission to Greece
Greece
Greece , officially the Hellenic Republic , and historically Hellas or the Republic of Greece in English, is a country in southeastern Europe....

 & Turkey
Turkey
Turkey , known officially as the Republic of Turkey , is a Eurasian country located in Western Asia and in East Thrace in Southeastern Europe...

 and in due course appointed Assistant Director of the US AID Mission to India
India
India , officially the Republic of India , is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by geographical area, the second-most populous country with over 1.2 billion people, and the most populous democracy in the world...

 (until 1968).

Teaching and Research

In 1969, Bill Felstiner started a university teaching career as Associate Dean and Lecturer at Yale University Law School. While at Yale he helped direct the Yale Program in Law and Modernization. In 1973 he joined UCLA as Assistant Professor. In 1976 he decided to devote full time to research,working, first, at the USC's
University of Southern California
The University of Southern California is a private, not-for-profit, nonsectarian, research university located in Los Angeles, California, United States. USC was founded in 1880, making it California's oldest private research university...

 Social Science Research Institute, then at the Rand Corporation's Civil Justice Institute and, finally, at the American Bar Foundation
American Bar Foundation
Established in 1952, the ' is an independent, nonprofit national research institute located in Chicago, Illinois committed to objective empirical research on law and legal institutions...

, of which he was executive director. While at USC he served as co-PI of the US Justice Department-funded Civil Litigation Research Project. Then he moved back to teaching and to the university. After teaching in Political Science at Northwestern University
Northwestern University
Northwestern University is a private research university in Evanston and Chicago, Illinois, USA. Northwestern has eleven undergraduate, graduate, and professional schools offering 124 undergraduate degrees and 145 graduate and professional degrees....

, he became professor of sociology in the Law and Society Program at the University of California, Santa Barbara
University of California, Santa Barbara
The University of California, Santa Barbara, commonly known as UCSB or UC Santa Barbara, is a public research university and one of the 10 general campuses of the University of California system. The main campus is located on a site in Goleta, California, from Santa Barbara and northwest of Los...

 (1992–1999). In the years 2000-2003 he was director of the International Institute for the Sociology of Law
International Institute for the Sociology of Law
The International Institute for the Sociology of Law in Oñati is the only international establishment which is entirely devoted to teaching and promoting the sociology of law, socio-legal studies, and law and society research....

 in Oñati
Oñati
Oñati is a town located in the province of Gipuzkoa, in the autonomous community of the Basque Country, in the north of Spain. It has a population of approximately 10,500 and lies in a valley in the center of the Basque country. It lies about 40 km south of the Bay of Biscay and is about 236 m...

 (Gipuzkoa, Spain
Spain
Spain , officially the Kingdom of Spain languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Spain's official name is as follows:;;;;;;), is a country and member state of the European Union located in southwestern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula...

). From 1995-2005 he also held the position of Distinguished Research Professor of Law at Cardiff University
Cardiff University
Cardiff University is a leading research university located in the Cathays Park area of Cardiff, Wales, United Kingdom. It received its Royal charter in 1883 and is a member of the Russell Group of Universities. The university is consistently recognised as providing high quality research-based...

 (Wales
Wales
Wales is a country that is part of the United Kingdom and the island of Great Britain, bordered by England to its east and the Atlantic Ocean and Irish Sea to its west. It has a population of three million, and a total area of 20,779 km²...

, UK).

Areas of special interest

In his early work, Bill Felstiner focussed on alternative ways to solve conflicts (avoidance, mediation
Mediation
Mediation, as used in law, is a form of alternative dispute resolution , a way of resolving disputes between two or more parties. A third party, the mediator, assists the parties to negotiate their own settlement...

, litigation etc.), touring Western Europe for possible models both in criminal and civil procedure. He continued his interest in litigation and alternatives to litigation as co-PI of the Civil Litigation Research Project (CLRP)a joint venture of USC and the University of Wisconsin funded by the US Department of Justice, conducted a major study of litigation in federal courts and the operation of alternative fora for civil disputes. Felstiner participated in all aspects of CLRP's work and (together with Rick Abel
Richard Abel
Richard L. Abel is Professor of Law , specialist in African Law Studies and renowned socio-legal scholar. He received his B.A. from Harvard University , his LL.B. from Columbia University and his Ph.D. from the University of London . He has been a member of the UCLA Law faculty since 1974...

 and Austin Sarat
Austin Sarat
Austin Sarat is William Nelson Cromwell professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College in Amherst, Massachusetts. He is also a Five College Fortieth Anniversary Professor. He has written, co-written, or edited more than fifty books in the fields of law and political science. ...

),developed the idea of a disputes pyramid and the formula "naming, blaming, claiming", which refers to different stages of conflict resolution and levels of the pyramid. At Rand's Civil Justice Institute, he initiated a long-term investigation into asbestos
Asbestos
Asbestos is a set of six naturally occurring silicate minerals used commercially for their desirable physical properties. They all have in common their eponymous, asbestiform habit: long, thin fibrous crystals...

 litigation. After that he concentrated his organizational and research energies on the legal profession, publishing a book on divorce
Divorce
Divorce is the final termination of a marital union, canceling the legal duties and responsibilities of marriage and dissolving the bonds of matrimony between the parties...

 lawyering and editing one on the legal culture
Legal culture
Legal cultures are described as being temporary outcomes of interactions and occur pursuant to a challenge and response paradigm. Analyses of core legal paradigms shape the characteristics of individual and distinctive legal cultures....

 of global business transactions. From 1994-2000, he also chaired the influential Working Group on Legal Professions of the Research Committee on Sociology of Law, 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
Hurricane Katrina
Hurricane Katrina of the 2005 Atlantic hurricane season was a powerful Atlantic hurricane. It is the costliest natural disaster, as well as one of the five deadliest hurricanes, in the history of the United States. Among recorded Atlantic hurricanes, it was the sixth strongest overall...

 in 2005, he volunteered and worked as the director of one on the largest shelters for the homeless of New Orleans. In 2007 he founded, together with colleagues from Santa Barbara, the Chad Relief Foundation (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
Central African Republic
The Central African Republic , is a landlocked country in Central Africa. It borders Chad in the north, Sudan in the north east, South Sudan in the east, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the Republic of the Congo in the south, and Cameroon in the west. The CAR covers a land area of about ,...

 in South Chad
Chad
Chad , officially known as the Republic of Chad, is a landlocked country in Central Africa. It is bordered by Libya to the north, Sudan to the east, the Central African Republic to the south, Cameroon and Nigeria to the southwest, and Niger to the west...

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 B.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 of Law (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 631 (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.
The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
x
OK