More Lawyers Than People: The Global Multiplication of Legal Professionals
November 1, 2011 3:00pm
Room 401 of KoGuan Law School
Minhang Campus, Shanghai Jiao Tong University
Marc Galanter
Marc Galanter, the John and Rylla Bosshard Professor 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, studies litigation, lawyers, and legal culture. He is the author of a number of highly regarded and seminal studies of litigation and disputing in the United States (including "Why the 'Haves' Come Out Ahead: Speculations on the Limits of Legal Change," one of the most-cited articles in the legal literature. His work includes pioneering studies on the impact of disputant capabilities in adjudication, the relation of public legal institutions to informal regulation, and patterns of litigation in the United States. He is also co-author of Tournament of Lawyers (with Thomas Palay, 1991) which is widely viewed as the most robust explanation of the growth and transformation of large law firms.
He is an outspoken critic of misrepresentations of the American civil justice system and of the inadequate knowledge base that makes the system so vulnerable to misguided attacks.
Much of his early work was on India. He is recognized as a leading American student of the Indian legal system. He is an Honorary Professor of the National Law School of India, served as advisor to the Ford Foundation on legal services and human rights programs in India, and was retained as an expert by the government of Indiain the litigation arising from the Bhopaldisaster. He is currently engaged in research on access to justice in India.
A leading figure in the empirical study of the legal system, he has been editor of the Law & Society Review, President of the Law and Society Association, Chair of the International Commission on Folk Law and Legal Pluralism, a Guggenheim Fellow, and a Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. He is a member of the American Law Institute and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He received degrees in philosophy and law from the Universityof Chicago. In addition to the Universityof Wisconsin and the London School of Economics, he has taught at Chicago, Buffalo, Columbia, and Stanford.