Conversations in Law and Society
The Center for the Study of Law and Society has undertaken an important new project —building a video archive of interviews with the founders and leading figures of the field of Law and Society conducted by Lauren Edelman, Calvin Morrill, David Lieberman, Bob Kagan, and Jonathan Simon. The Conversations are taped the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law, in front of a live audience of distinguished scholars and graduate students who are invited to ask questions following the formal interview. We invite you to enjoy these engaging conversations with the founders and leading figures of the field of law and society. For further information, contact CSLS at csls@law.berkeley.edu.
Also see the 2020 Annual Review of Law and Social Science article, "Conversations in Law and Society: Oral Histories of the Emergence and Transformation of the Movement" written by CSLS affiliates Calvin Morrill, Lauren B. Edelman; former CSLS Executive Director Rosann Greenspan, and Berkeley Ph.D. candidate Yan Fang. This article uses the oral histories of surviving founders to explore the emergence of law and society as a scholarly movement and its transformation to a scholarly field.
The Conversations:
1. A Conversation with Joseph R. Gusfield
Interviewed by Lauren Edelman
Date: 02/12/2010 Duration: 00:53:30 Description: Joseph Gusfield is Professor of Sociology Emeritus at the University of California, San Diego and Distinguished Affiliated Scholar at the Center for the Study of Law and Society. His books Symbolic Crusade: Status Politics and the American Temperance Movement and The Culture of Public Problems: Drinking, Driving and the Symbolic Order, among others, helped define the fields of the sociology of law, the sociology of social movements, and the sociology of social problems. Sponsor: The Center for the Study of Law and Society
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2. A Conversation with Stewart Macaulay
Interviewed by Lauren Edelman
Date: 04/23/2010 Duration: 01:06:40 Description: Stewart Macaulay is Professor of Law Emeritus at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and internationally recognized as a leader of the law-in-action approach to contracts. His article, “Non-Contractual Relations and Business: A Preliminary Study,” published in the American Sociological Review in 1963, is a foundational work in the field of law and society. Professor Macaulay has written extensively on subjects ranging from lawyers and consumer law to private government and legal pluralism. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, has been president of the Law and Society Association, winner of the Kalven Prize, and Director of the Chile Law Program of the International Legal Center in Santiago, among many other honors. Sponsor: The Center for the Study of Law and Society
3. A Conversation with Lawrence Friedman
Interviewed by Lauren Edelman
Date: 10/15/2010 Duration: 57:26 Description: Lawrence M. Friedman is Marion Rice Kirkwood Professor of Law and Professor of History and Political Science at Stanford University. A founder of the field of law and society, Professor Friedman is “generally regarded as [James Willard] Hurst’s successor as the greatest of American social-legal historians.” A member of the American Academy of Arts and Science since 1977, holding honorary degrees from six universities at home and abroad, Friedman has been president of the Law and Society Association, the American Society for Legal History, and the Research Committee on the Sociology of Law of the International Sociological Association. Sponsor: The Center for the Study of Law and Society
4. A Conversation with Laura Nader
Interviewed by Calvin Morrill
Date: 03/11/2011 Duration: 01:08 Description: Laura Nader is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, where she has served on the faculty since 1960. A founder of the field of law and society, Professor Nader is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the 1995 winner of the Kalven Prize recognizing a body of empirical scholarship that has contributed to the advancement of research in law and society. Her work has had an indelible impact in many areas including the comparative ethnography of law and dispute resolution, conflict, comparative family organization, the anthropology of professional mindsets and ethnology of the Middle East, Mexico, Latin America and the contemporary United States. Sponsor: The Center for the Study of Law and Society
5. A Conversation with Marc Galanter
Interviewed by Lauren Edelman
Date: 04/08/2011 Duration: 01:09 Description: Marc Galanter is the John and Rylla Bosshard Professor Emeritus of Law and South Asian Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and LSE Centennial Professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He is the author of seminal studies of litigation, lawyers and disputing including, “Why the ‘Haves’ Come Out Ahead: Speculations on the Limits of Legal Change,” one of the most widely cited articles in the legal literature.Galanter was the 1993 winner of the Kalven Prize “for his landmark empirical studies of law and social change in India and equally impressive empirical studies in the United States, most recently focusing on law in American law firms.” He is a past president of the Law and Society Association, a member of the American Law Institute and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Sponsor: The Center for the Study of Law and Society
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6. A Conversation with Jerome Skolnick
Interviewed by Calvin Morrill
Date: 02/10/2012 Duration: 01:08 Description: Jerome Skolnick is Claire Clements Dean’s Chair Emeritus at Berkeley Law and, until 2011, taught at NYU School of Law and was co-director of NYU’s Center for Research in Crime and Justice. He was director of the Center for the Study of Law and Society from 1972 to 1985, and was a founding faculty member of the Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program. Skolnick’s 1966 book /Justice Without Trial: Law Enforcement in Democratic Society/, a seminal study of police culture and practice, was recently released in a fourth edition. Another acclaimed book, /The Politics of Protest/, was recently republished in its Fortieth Anniversary Edition. Skolnick’s many honors include the C. Wright Mills Award of the Society for the Study of Social Problems and the American Society of Criminology’s August Vollmer Award. He served as 1993-94 president of the American Society of Criminology. Sponsor: The Center for the Study of Law and Society
7. A Conversation with Sally Falk Moore
Interviewed by Calvin Morrill
Date: 03/02/2012 Duration: 01:09 Description: Sally Falk Moore is Victor S. Thomas Professor of Anthropology, Emerita, at Harvard University. She received her JD from Columbia Law School in 1945 and her PhD in anthropology from Columbia University in 1957. She developed and chaired the Department of Anthropology at the University of Southern California (1963–1977). She joined the Harvard faculty in 1981, and was Dean of the Graduate School from 1985 to 1989. Her books include Law as Process (1978, 2nd ed. 2000), Social Facts and Fabrications: “Customary” Law on Kilimanjaro 1880–1980 (1986), Anthropology and Africa (1994), and Law and Anthropology: A Reader (2004). A groundbreaker in the field of legal anthropology, Dr. Moore was named Huxley Memorial Medalist and Lecturer for 1999. She is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the 2005 recipient of the Kalven Prize of the Law and Society Association. Sponsor: The Center for the Study of Law and Society
8. A Conversation with Sanford H. Kadish
Interviewed by David Lieberman
Date: 10/05/2012 Duration: 00:53 Description: Sanford H. Kadish is the Alexander F. and May T. Morrison Professor of Law (Emeritus) at Berkeley Law. He joined the Boalt faculty in 1964 and served as dean from 1975 to 1982, during which time he co-founded the Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program with Philip Selznick. He has been president of both the American Association of University Professors and the Association of American Law Schools, as well as vice president of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has received honorary degrees from the City University of New York, the University of Cologne, and Southwestern University. He is a recipient of the Berkeley Citation. The Center for the Study of Law and Society dedicated the Sanford H. Kadish Library in his honor at a celebration on November 5, 2012. A photo gallery of the event is available at https://www.law.berkeley.edu/research/center-for-the-study-of-law-societ.... Sponsor: The Center for the Study of Law and Society
9. A Conversation with William K. “Sandy” Muir
Interviewed by Robert A. Kagan
Date: 01/25/2013 Duration: 01:08 Description: William K. “Sandy” Muir received his JD from the University of Michigan Law School in 1958 and his PhD from Yale University in 1965. He joined UC Berkeley’s Department of Political Science in 1968, chaired the department during the 1980s, and became Professor Emeritus in 1998. His books, each a creative landmark in the field of public law, leave no branch of government unexamined. His first, Law and Attitude Change (first published as Prayer in the Public Schools (University of Chicago Press, 1967, 1974) won the American Political Science Association’s Edward S. Corwin Prize. Police: Streetcorner Politicians (University of Chicago Press, 1977) was awarded the Hadley B. Cantril Prize. Later books include Legislature: California’s School for Politics (1982); The Bully Pulpit: The Presidential Leadership of Ronald Reagan (1993); and most recently, Freedom in America (2011). Sponsor: The Center for the Study of Law and Society
10. A Conversation with Harry N. Scheiber
Interviewed by David Lieberman
Date: 04/05/2013 Duration: 01:07 Description: Harry N. Scheiber is Chancellor’s Professor Emeritus, Stefan A. Riesenfeld Professor of Law (Emeritus) and Professor of History (Emeritus) at the University of California, Berkeley. He served three terms as Chair and Associate Dean for the Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program, and was Director of the Earl Warren Legal Institute, the Institute for Legal Research and the Center for the Study of Law Society. He is Past-President of the American Society for Legal History, founder of the Law of the Sea Institute and directed the Sho Sato Program in Japanese and US Law. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2004 and received the Berkeley Citation in 2012. Primary books include: Ohio Canal Era–A Case Study of Government and the Economy; The Wilson Administration and Civil Liberties; Legal Cultures and the Legal Profession; American Law and the Constitutional Order; Law of the Sea: The Common Heritage and Emerging Challenges; American Economic History; Perspectives on Federalism; Federalism and the Judicial Mind; Earl Warren and the Warren Court; Bringing New Law to Ocean Waters. Sponsor: The Center for the Study of Law and Society
11. A Conversation with Richard D. “Red” Schwartz
INTERVIEWED BY CALVIN MORRILL
Date: 05/31/2013 Duration: 01:10 Description: Richard D. “Red” Schwartz is Ernest I. White Professor Emeritus at the College of Law of Syracuse University and Senior Research Scholar at Yale Law School. He earned his B.A. and Ph.D. in Sociology at Yale, and taught in both sociology and law at Yale and Northwestern University. He served as the nation’s first non-lawyer law school dean, at State University of New York at Buffalo Law School (1971-1976), and was a co-founder of the Law & Society Association and founding editor of the Law & Society Review. Author of many scholarly publications including Society and the Legal Order, Unobtrusive Measures, and Criminal Law: Theory and Process, his latest book, Law Not War, came out in 2010. Almost 60 years after publication in the Yale Law Journal (1954), “Social Factors in the Development of Legal Control: A Case Study of Two Israeli Settlements,” remains a classic in the field. This interview took place at the 2013 Law and Society Association Annual Meeting in Boston, where Red also received the Association’s Ronald Pipkin Service Award. Sponsor: The Center for the Study of Law and Society
12. A Conversation with David M. Trubek and Louise G. Trubek
INTERVIEWED BY JONATHAN SIMON
Date: 11/08/2013 Duration: 01:27 Description: David M. Trubek is Voss-Bascom Professor of Law Emeritus at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a Senior Research Fellow at Harvard Law School. A graduate of UW-Madison (1957) and the Yale Law School (1961), he directed the Civil Litigation Research Project and was founding director of UW’s Institute for Legal Studies. A longtime member and former Trustee of the Law and Society Association, he received the Association’s Kalven Prize in 2002 and was appointed Chevalier des Palmes Academiques by the French Government in recognition of his work on globalization. He has written extensively on international and comparative law, on the role of law in development, human rights, European integration, the changing role of the legal profession, and the impact of globalization on legal systems and social protection schemes, as well as on critical legal theory, the sociology of law, and civil procedure. He is co-director of GLEE, the Project on Globalization, Lawyers, and Emerging Economies. Louise G. Trubek is Emerita Clinical Professor at the University of Wisconsin Law School. A graduate of the University of Wisconsin (1957) and the Yale Law School (1960), she is an active scholar and teacher in the fields of health law, public interest law, and regulation and governance, and has won numerous awards for outstanding contributions particularly in the fields of public interest law and legal education. A longtime member and former Trustee of the Law and Society Association, she is a co-organizer of a Law and Society sponsored International Research Collaboration on Reflective Practitioners/Public Interest Law. Sponsor: The Center for the Study of Law and Society
13. A Conversation with Robert A. Kagan
Interviewed by Calvin Morrill
Date: 03/14/2014 Duration: 01:22 Description: Robert A. Kagan is Professor in the Graduate School and Professor Emeritus of Political Science and Law at U.C. Berkeley. He holds a JD from Columbia Law School (1962) and a Ph.D. from Yale University (1974). From 1993 to 2003, he was Director of the Center for the Study of Law and Society. Kagan is widely known for his work on regulatory enforcement and compliance, as well as on the relationships between politics, legal structures, and legal processes. His books include Regulatory Justice (1978); Going by the Book: The Problem of Regulatory Unreasonableness (1982); Regulatory Encounters: Multinational Corporations and American Adversarial Legalism (2001); Adversarial Legalism: The American Way of Law (2001); Shades of Green: Business, Regulation, and Environment (2003); Consequential Courts: Judicial Roles in Global Perspective (2013). He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, recipient of both a Lifetime Achievement Award and a Teaching Award from the Law-Courts Section of the American Political Science Association, and recipient of the Law and Society Association’s Harry Kalven Prize for distinguished sociolegal scholarship and its Stanton Wheeler Award for teaching and mentorship. Sponsor: The Center for the Study of Law and Society
14. A Conversation with Sally Engle Merry
Interviewed by Calvin Morrill
Date: 02/06/2015 Duration: 01:27 Description: Sally Engle Merry is Silver Professor of Anthropology at New York University and a faculty director of the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice at NYU School of Law. She was a Professor of Anthropology at Wellesley College from 1975 to 2005. Her books include Urban Danger: Life in a Neighborhood of Strangers (1980), Getting Justice and Getting Even: Legal Consciousness Among Working-Class Americans (1990), Colonizing Hawai’i: The Cultural Power of Law (2000), which received the J. Willard Hurst Prize from the Law and Society Association, Human Rights and Gender Violence: Translating International Law into Local Justice (2006), which won the J.I. Staley Prize, and Gender Violence: A Cultural Perspective (2009). She has served as President of the Law and Society Association, the Association for Political and Legal Anthropology, and the American Ethnological Society. She was the 2007 recipient of the Kalven Prize of the Law and Society Association, recognizing a significant a body of scholarship in the field. In 2013 she received the honorary degree of Doctor of Law, honoris causa from McGill University, Montreal, Canada. Sponsor: The Center for the Study of Law and Society
15. A Conversation with John Comaroff and Jean Comaroff
INTERVIEWED BY CALVIN MORRILL
Date: 09/11/2015
Duration: 01:38
Description:
John Comaroff is Hugh K. Foster Professor of African and African American Studies and of Anthropology and Oppenheimer Fellow in African Studies at Harvard University. Before moving to Harvard, he was the Harold H. Swift Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago, Honorary Professor of Anthropology at the University of Cape Town, and Research Professor at the American Bar Foundation. His authored and edited books include, with Jean Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution (2 vols), Ethnography and the Historical Imagination, Modernity and its Malcontents, Civil Society and the Political Imagination in Africa, Millennial Capitalism and the Culture of Neoliberalism, Law and Disorder in the Postcolony, Ethnicity, Inc., Zombies et Frontières A l’Ere Néolibérale, and Theory from the South: or, how Euro-America is evolving toward Africa.
Jean Comaroff is Alfred North Whitehead Professor of African and African American Studies and of Anthropology, and Oppenheimer Fellow in African Studies, at Harvard University. Before moving to Harvard, she was the Bernard E. and Ellen C. Sunny Distinguished Service Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago, and Director of the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory. She is also Honorary Professor at the University of Cape Town. Her publications include Body of Power, Spirit of Resistance: the Culture and History of a South African People (1985), “Beyond the Politics of Bare Life: AIDS and the Global Order” (2007); and, with John L. Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution (vols. l [1991] and ll [1997]); Ethnography and the Historical Imagination (1992); Millennial Capitalism and the Culture of Neoliberalism (2000), Law and Disorder in the Postcolony (2006), Ethnicity, Inc. (2009), and Theory from the South, or How Euro-America is Evolving Toward Africa (2011).
Among their many honors, they are elected Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and they jointly received the Kalven Prize from the Law & Society Association.
16. A Conversation with Malcolm Feeley
Malcolm Feeley
INTERVIEWED BY JONATHAN SIMON
Date: 10/23/2015
Duration: 01:23
Malcolm M. Feeley is the Claire Sanders Clements Dean’s Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law. Prior to moving to Berkeley, he was Professor of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison; a Russell Sage Foundation Fellow at Yale Law School; and Assistant Professor of Political Science at NYU. He has also been a visiting professor at Hebrew University, Kobe University, and Princeton University. A leading scholar of law, courts and criminal justice, among his books are The Process is the Punishment: Handling Cases in a Lower Criminal Court; Court Reform on Trial: Why Simple Soluttions Fail; Judicial Policy Making and the Modern State: How the Courts Reformed America’s Prisons (with Edward Rubin). He received the 2015 Harry Kalven Award of the Law and Society Association for a significant body of scholarship in law and society, and the 2015 Paul Tappan Award of the Western Society of Criminology for outstanding contributions to the field of criminology. Professor Feeley was Director of the Center for the Study of Law and Society from 1985 to 1992 and President of the Law and Society Association from 2005 to 2007.
17. A Conversation with Susan S. Silbey
Susan S. Silbey
INTERVIEWED BY CALVIN MORRILL
Date: 2/3/2017
Duration: 01:23
Susan S. Silbey is Leon and Anne Goldberg Professor of Humanities, Professor of Sociology and Anthropology, and Professor of Behavioral and Policy Sciences, Sloan School of Management at MIT. Previously she was William F. Kenan Professor of Sociology at Wellesley College. Her books include The Common Place of Law: Stories from Everyday Life (with Patricia Ewick), In Litigation: Do the ‘Haves’ Still Come Out Ahead (with Herbert Kritzer), Law and Science (I): Epistemological, Evidentiary, and Relational Engagements, and Law and Science (II): Regulation of Property, Practices, and Products. She received the 2009 Harry Kalven Award of the Law and Society Association for a significant body of scholarship in law and society, as well as the LSA’s 2015 Stan Wheeler Mentorship Award. Professor Silbey served as President of the Law and Society Association from 1995-1996, and Editor of the Law and Society Review from 1998 to 2003. She is a member of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, and received the Doctor Honoris Causa from Ecole Normale Superiere Cachan in Paris (2006).
18. A Conversation with Austin Sarat
Austin Sarat
Interviewed by Jonathan Simon
Date: 04/21/2017Duration: 01:22
Austin D. Sarat is William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science and Associate Dean of the Faculty at Amherst College, where he has served on the faculty since 1974. In addition to many authored books and articles, Sarat has distinguished himself as the leading editor of books and book series in law and society and law and the humanities. His series include the International Library of Essays in Law and Society and Studies in Law, Politics and Society. Among almost 100 edited books are Law’s Violence (1992), Law in Everyday Life (1993), The Killing State: Capital Punishment in Law, Politics, and Culture (1999), Blackwell Companion to Law and Society (2004), Human Rights and the American Story (2017). He also edits the journal Law, Culture, and the Humanities. Sarat has served as President of the Law and Society Association and founding President of the Association for the Study of Law, Culture and the Humanities. Among many honors and awards, he has received the LSA’s Harry Kalven Award for distinguished research (1997), Stan Wheeler Prize for distinguished teaching and mentoring (2009) and Ronald Pipkin Service Award (2014), as well as the Lasting Contribution Award of the APSA Section on Law and Courts (2011), and an honorary Doctor of Law from Providence College (2008).
19. A Conversation with Kitty Calavita
Interviewed by Jonathan Simon
Date: 11/30/17
Duration: 01:23
Kitty Calavita is Chancellor’s Professor Emerita of Criminology, Law and Society at the University of California, Irvine and Distinguished Affiliated Scholar at the Center for the Study of Law and Society. Much of her work examines the interplay of political, ideological, and economic factors in the implementation of immigration law, the treatment of white-collar crime, and, most recently, prisoners’ rights. In all of these cases, she explores what they can tell us about relations of power and state processes. Her books include Inside the State: The Bracero Program, Immigration, and the INS (1992); Big Money Crime: Fraud and Politics in the Savings and Loan Industry (1997, with Pontell & Tillman); Immigrants at the Margins: Law, Race, and Exclusion in Southern Europe (2005); Invitation to Law & Society: An Introduction to the Study of Real Law (2010; 2nd edition, 2016); Appealing to Justice: Prisoner Grievances, Rights, and Carceral Logic (2015, with Valerie Jenness). Calavita was the recipient of the Harry J. Kalven Jr. Award of the Law & Society Association in 2015; she was inducted as the Thorsten Sellin Fellow of the American Academy of Political and Social Science in 2010; and she received the Albert J. Reiss, Jr. Award for Distinguished Scholarship from the Crime, Law, and Deviance Section of the American Sociological Association in 2001. She has served as President of the Law and Society Association (2001-02) and Chair of the Sociology of Law Section of the American Sociological Association (2007).
20. A Conversation with Richard Delgado
Interviewed by Jonathan Simon
Date: 4/24/19
Duration: 01:05
Richard Delgado is John J. Sparkman Chair of Law at the Hugh F. Culverhouse Jr. School of Law at The University of Alabama. Author of over one hundred journal articles and twenty books, Delgado’s work has been praised or reviewed in The Nation, The New Republic, the New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal. His books have won eight national book prizes, including six Gustavus Myers awards for outstanding book on human rights in North America, the American Library Association’s Outstanding Academic Book, and a Pulitzer Prize nomination. Professor Delgado’s teaching and writing focus on race, the legal profession, and social change.
Selected Honors include the Senator Dennis Chavez Endowed Lecture, University of New Mexico, 2014; Wayne Morse Visiting Distinguished Scholar, University of Oregon, 2008; Doctor of Laws, LL.D (honoris causa), John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City College of New York, May 2007; Sir George Turner Lectures, University of Melbourne School of Law (Aus.), 1995; Scholar-in-Residence, Rockefeller Foundation International Study Center, Bellagio Italy, 1993.