Bill Felstiner

Bill Felstiner (Onati, 2007)

Bill Felstiner under beret (Onati, 2007)

William LF Felstiner (born December 14, 1929 in New York City ), mostly known as Bill Felstiner, is an internationally recognized American legal sociologist and a humanitarian aid organizer.

Education and early employment

After completing his legal education (LL.B. 1959 Yale University ), Bill Felstiner initially worked for a large law firm for a few years. He then worked for three years in Greece , Turkey and India as part of the American development organization USAID .

Research and Teaching

In 1969 he returned to the university as Dean and Lecturer at Yale and Assistant Professor at UCLA . From 1976, however, he turned away from teaching and the empirical investigation of legal practice: first at the Social Science Research Institute of the University of Southern California , later within the framework of the Civil Justice Institute of the Rand Corporation and finally as an employee and director of the American Bar Foundation . After a professorship in political science at Northwestern University , he became professor of sociology (with a focus on law and society) at the University of California, Santa Barbara (1992–1999). From 2000–2003 he headed the renowned International Institute for the Sociology of Law in Oñati ( Gipuzkoa , Spain ). From 1995 to 2005 he was also Distinguished Research Professor of Law at Cardiff University ( Wales ). Until 2007 he was editor of the "Onati International Series in Law and Society". On the occasion of his departure, he was presented with a beret (txapela), usually reserved for the masters of a Basque sport.

Focus of work

Felstiner began with empirical studies on alternative solutions to conflicts. He also traveled to Western Europe and was interested, among other things, in the German institution of the penal order. The formulation of "naming, blaming, claiming", which he created (with Rick Abel and Austin Sarat), which refers to different levels of conflict processing, became particularly well known. As part of the Civil Justice Institute of the Rand Corporation, he initiated the long-term investigation into judicial processing of asbestos damage. This was followed by work on the legal profession (especially using the example of divorce lawyers) and work on the legal culture of global business practices.

Humanitarian aid

After completing his academic career, Bill Felstiner returned to his beginnings and has since dedicated himself to humanitarian work. He volunteered in and around New Orleans during the 2005 floods . In 2007 he founded the NGO Chad Relief (CRF) together with colleagues from Santa Barbara . This non-profit organization and has set itself the goal of the refugees, consisting of the Central African Republic in Chad to help come, as well as the local population, which lives in the vicinity of the refugee camps.

family

He has two sons with his wife, Gray.

Publications (selection)

• (Ed.) What Lawyers Do. Narratives from the Yale Law School Class of 1958. Santa Barbara: El Bosque 2018.
• Reorganization and Resistance: Legal Professions Confront a Changing World (Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2005) (Ed.).
• Federalismo / Federalism Madrid: Dykinson 2004 (Ed. Together with Manuel Calvo Garcia).
• Rules and Networks: The Legal Culture of Global Business Transactions (Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2001) (Ed. Together with V. Gessner and RP Appelbaum).
• "Firm Handling: The Litigation Strategies of Defense Lawyers in Personal Injury Cases", 20 Legal Studies 1 (2000) (co-authored).
• "Justice and Power in the Legal Profession" in R. Garth & A. Sarat (Eds.) Justice and Power in Sociolegal Studies (Evanston: Northwestern 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).
• Asbestos Litigation in the United Kingdom: An Interim Report. Together with R.Dingwall (Oxford: Center for Socio-legal Studies; Chicago: American Bar Foundation, 1988).
• "The Economic Costs of Ordinary Litigation," 31 UCLA Law Review 72 (1983).
• Asbestos in the Courts. The Challenge of Mass Toxic Torts, with Deborah Hensler a. a. (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)
• Community Mediation in Dorchester, Massachusetts (Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office , 1980) (together with Lynn A. Williams).
• 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);
• “Avoidance as Dispute Processing: an Elaboration”, 9 Law & Society Review (1974), 695.

Individual evidence

1. ^ American Bar Foundation
2. ↑ Chad Relief (CRF) ( Memento of the original from May 3, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
3. ↑ rand.org (PDF; 4.8 MB)