The law and society community was heartbroken to learn in February 2023 that Lauren B. Edelman (“Laurie”) passed away. Laurie obtained her Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Wisconsin before earning a Juris Doctor degree from University of California, Berkeley and a doctoral degree from Stanford University. She spent the first part of her career as a Professor at the University of Wisconsin Sociology department before joining the University of California, Berkeley Law and Jurisprudence and Social Policy program as the Agnes Roddy Robb Professor of Law and Sociology in 1996.
Upon Laurie's passing, scholars across the world publicly and privately mourned and expressed their sadness and love for Laurie as a scholar and human being. Following other memorials and celebrations of life across the US and beyond, in June 2023 the Law and Society Association also hosted a panel session honoring Laurie's life at the Annual Meeting in Puerto Rico.
The co-editors of Law and Society Review decided to honor Laurie with a special memorial issue because Laurie's career was devoted to advancing law and society. Stated another way, Laurie was law and society. Beginning in 1984 when Laurie became a member of the Law and Society Association (LSA), Laurie's commitment over multiple decades was unmatched: President (2002–03), Secretary (1997–99), two-time Trustee (1993–96; 2019–22), LSA Stanton Wheeler Mentorship Award (2017), LSA Article Prize (2012), and Harry J. Kalven Prize (2018).
Laurie was a pioneer in studying the application of anti-discrimination laws to different organizations and developing and elaborating new institutional organizational theory. Laurie's work bridged the sociology of law and the sociology of organizations and opened other law and society scholars to entirely new ways to study law and inequality, workplace discrimination and harassment, symbolic compliance, and disputing and rights mobilization. Laurie's book, Working Law: Courts, Corporations and Symbolic Civil Rights, won the 2018 Distinguished Scholarly Book Award from the American Sociological Association, the 2017 Distinguished Book Award from the Sociology of Law Section of the American Sociological Association, the 2017 George R. Terry Book Award from the Academy of Management, and an honorable mention for the 2017 C. Herman Pritchett Book Prize from the Law and Courts Section of the American Political Science Association.
Besides mentoring countless graduate students, Laurie mentored multiple generations of scholars by using the Law and Society Association and the annual meetings as a platform to helps others chart their academic journey. Laurie was also one of the founding faculty of the Law and Society Association/National Science Foundation/American Bar Association doctoral fellowship in law and inequality. For someone who gave her entire professional career to advancing the field of law and society and brought so many junior scholars into the law and society scholarly community, this special memorial issue is the least we can do to honor her legacy and commitment to the field.
HIGHLIGHTS FROM THE SPECIAL MEMORIAL ISSUE
The contributions in this special issue illuminate many aspects of Laurie as a scholar and professor but also as a kind, thoughtful, caring human being: her devotion and care for students and mentoring, pathbreaking scholarly research agenda, masterful teaching style, commitment to collaboration and collegiality, humor, and of course, love for dogs, music, coffee, and jewelry making.
Professor Robin Stryker starts us off by providing wonderful insights into Laurie's journey to becoming an exemplary scholar. Professor Stryker's essay traces their long, deep friendship that began when Laurie was an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin where they first met. But, Professor Stryker's essay really highlights all aspects of Laurie: the hard-working ethos, the careful and thoughtful collaborator, the brilliant intellectual mind, the quick wit, sharp humor, and love for music. Reading Professor Stryker's essay helps us realize that Laurie lived a full life filled with adventure.
Laurie's respect among her peers is highlighted by Professor Michael McCann's contribution. Professor McCann notes that, although never formal colleagues or collaborators, he and Laurie came up together through the law and society community during a similar time period. Professor McCann's essay is a real-time journey through all their overlapping interactions in the law and society governance structure. In addition to highlighting the healthy friendship they shared, Professor McCann's thoughtful reflections show a deep respect and admiration for Laurie as a scholar, professional and institutional leader, teacher and mentor for graduate students.
Laurie's “legal endogeneity” theory and new institutional theories of law and organizations framework influenced scholars' understanding of organizations' responses to law across the world. In particular, it provided a template for how to study issues concerning organizations and law. French Professor Jerome Pelisse's contribution traces how Laurie's work on the way private organizations shape and influence the content and meaning of laws designed to regulate them influenced French sociologists, institutional economists, and political sciences in the past 20 years. Professor Pelisse's essay explains in careful detail how Laurie's scholarship served as a basis for new areas of research in France, including workshops, conferences, and recent graduate level research by junior scholars.
Professor Mark Massoud highlights his approach to studying how workers mobilize and achieve their rights in the South Sudan. Professor Massoud explains how Laurie's work on employment law, organizational responses to law, and worker mobilization influenced the way he thought about workers' rights in a nation recently coming out of a civil war. Professor Massoud also shares some of the crucial advice and guidance Laurie provided him at different stages in his career.
One of Laurie's special gifts was her ability to frame research in interesting and novel ways. This skill was especially useful when advising graduate students. Professor Jamie Rowan's essay exemplifies this point. Although Professor Rowan was studying transitional justice during graduate school, a topic Laurie did not study, Laurie helped Professor Rowan realize she was really studying social movements and organizations. Professor Rowan notes how these pivotal mentoring conversations in graduate school shaped her ongoing research agenda on social movement organizations, domestic courts, and criminal legal innovations moving forward.
Laurie's influence was not just in scholarly debates and conversations. Laurie's scholarship made an imprint on the practice of law. Brent Nakamura, Trial Attorney at the United States Department of Justice, Antitrust Division, highlights with multiple examples how Laurie's work on symbolic structures and the difficulty of enforcing broad legal mandates that are lacking clear language and enforcement mechanisms identify real-word problems that lawyers and judges face daily in federal courts across the United States. From his training and mentorship under Laurie in graduate school to his experiences as a government attorney, Mr. Nakamura's reflections reveal that Laurie's work has strong practical implications for the way law should be practiced.
Professors Rachel Best, Catherine Fisk, and Linda Krieger and graduate students Yan Fang, Todd Neece, and Diana Reddy were working for the past 6 years with Laurie on a study of disability litigation. In their co-authored essay, they highlight—individually and collectively—how Laurie shaped the project with cross-disciplinary commitment, institutionalism, humaneness, and rigor. Their contribution highlights not only how Laurie influenced the research project with these values but more importantly, how Laurie influenced the academic spirit, vigor, and energy of her colleagues.
The final contribution to this special memorial issue, written by three current colleagues at UC Berkeley (two of whom were former students), Professors Catherine Albiston, Calvin Morrill, and Osagie Obasogie detail her unwavering commitment to being the best colleague and collaborator possible. Professor Albiston details the “hidden curriculum” of unwritten rules, unspoken expectations, and unofficial norms that Laurie imparted on her and others as they navigated becoming a successful academic. Professor Obasogie charts the evolution of their relationship from mentor/mentee while in graduate school to colleague to someone he looked forward to bumping into while going for long walks during the COVID-19 pandemic. Professor Morrill marveled at Laurie's “analytic tenacity” and desire for “substantive governance” as well as her “learning-by-doing” approach toward solving challenges encountered in collaborative research projects.
These essays collectively reveal the arc of a person who devoted herself to scholarship, teaching, service, collaboration, and mentorship at the highest levels. Whether the contributing authors to this special memorial issue were former students, collaborators, colleagues, or professional associates, they all highlight how much they learned from Laurie and how much they benefitted from her presence in their lives.
For people who were not fortunate enough to hear pearls of wisdom directly from Laurie, these tributes contain many pearls. In that sense, they are very useful reads, not only for junior scholars to gain advice, second hand but perfectly captured, but also for more established scholars to consider their own roles and measure their mentorship, generosity, and patience against a great teacher, mentor scholar, and overall human being.
From our experiences, we knew Laurie to be a fantastic mentor. Two of the three co-editors for Law and Society Review were directly mentored by Laurie in graduate school and throughout their careers. They have also included short excepts at the conclusion of this introduction with their own reflections on Laurie's impact on their lives. But, seeing so many others testify to her incredible mentoring skills over several generations provides added evidence and confirmation.
We note that although well known as a giant in the field, some of the most significant legacies are the typically unsung work of advising and mentoring students and dedicated performance of service work. We hope Laurie's legacy inspires other law and society scholars for future generations to follow in her footsteps.
ASHLEY RUBIN'S REFLECTIONS ON LAURIE
Laurie has lived in my head fairly constantly for the last decade or more. This may sound weird, but that is the best way to explain her tremendous influence and the significant impact she has had on me and my development as a scholar and a person.
I met Laurie when I was a graduate student between 2007 and 2013 in the Jurisprudence and Social Policy program at UC Berkeley, where she had been a professor since the 1990s. Laurie was not my official advisor in graduate school, nor was she on my dissertation committee; however, I was fortunate enough to take several of her seminars and she would generously answer my questions and give me advice during office hours, even after I was no longer a student in one of her classes. The fact that she was not an official mentor of mine and still had a significant influence on me speaks volumes about her generosity and role as a mentor to junior scholars.
In what was probably the most impactful half-hour of my education, I went into Laurie's office hours 1 day and asked her advice on writing the introduction to a paper I planned to submit to Law and Society Review. The paper was about eighteenth-century British convict transportation—this was not Laurie's time period, topical interest, or country of focus, by the way. I had already written one introduction couched in the punishment literature on disappointing penal reforms, but I had been instructed by Cal Morrill to try writing another introduction that would be more interesting to law and society scholars. I gave Laurie the punishment-themed introduction and she was clearly unimpressed. She asked, “Why would someone like me want to read this article?” Then I gave her the other introduction couched in classic law and society studies. Laurie said, “Now this is a study I would want to read.”
We talked some more and from this conversation, I learned the most valuable lesson of my career: to be published in a field-level journal like Law and Society Review, I needed to make my niche work on punishment or prisons interesting to someone who doesn't study punishment or prisons, someone like Laurie who doesn't study criminal justice at all. I would need to find what we had in common, such as organizational theory or the classics of law and society, to get a reader like her to read the introduction to a manuscript and be willing to keep reading. My manuscript was indeed published in LSR (Rubin 2012), using the Laurie-approved introduction.
Since then, when I write with the aim of publishing in Law and Society Review or Law and Social Inquiry, I think about what I need to say to get Laurie to read my work, or even perhaps to cite it. Similarly, I've instructed students with the same advice: what would you need to say to get Laurie Edelman, who is a law and society scholar with no interest in your particular topic, to read your paper?
To say that I will feel her absence keenly is an understatement. In my view, there is no replacement for Laurie. And even though she won't read any more of my papers, I will continue to ask myself, “How do I frame this so Laurie would read it?”
SHAUHIN TALESH'S REFLECTIONS ON LAURIE
I met Laurie while I was a graduate student at UC Berkeley's Jurisprudence and Social Policy program (JSP) from 2006 to 2011. Laurie was my dissertation chair and more importantly, my most important academic mentor or as I sometimes referred to and thought of her: my academic parent. She provided sage advice, nurtured my growth and development, and guided me toward the successful completion of the JSP program.
The unique thing about Laurie is she did it all: her scholarship was impeccable; her teaching outstanding; her service to students, colleagues, and the profession at large unrelenting. My remarks in this piece largely focus on Laurie's mentorship because it impacted me so much but also because I know being a great mentor was something she was proud of as well.
The mentorship relationship began at the conclusion of taking Laurie's Law and Organizations course spring semester, 2007. My final paper for the class was a variation of Laurie's “legal endogeneity theory.” The course heavily explored new institutional theories of law and organizations, a movement Laurie helped shape. Laurie's legal endogeneity theory shows how the content and meaning of civil rights laws are determined by organizations, the very group such laws are designed to regulate. Her processual model in the employment law context culminates by showing how courts ultimately defer to the presence of employer grievance structures and policies as evidence of compliance without evaluating whether such structures work. At some point during the semester, a spark went off in my mind. I had an idea to write a paper extending and applying legal endogeneity theory in the consumer protection context. I began re-reading all of Laurie's articles that were assigned in the course and many others that were not. I marveled at how each article Laurie published served as a building block for the next article that she wrote. It was such a well-conceived and executed research agenda. I was reading brilliance.
I chose to write a paper on how legal endogeneity can also explain how private organizations also influence the content and meaning of consumer protection legislation, using California's “lemon law” for automobiles. I turned the paper in when it was due in May and waited. A few weeks later Laurie sent me my article with track changed edits. I opened the document and read that Laurie stated it was the best graduate student paper she had ever read since becoming a professor. I was stunned. I closed the document and reopened it to make sure my eyes were not deceiving me. Laurie encouraged me to try to revise and publish the article. She also told me to come see her to discuss how to continue exploring my ideas. Talk about a confidence boost. Laurie's validation meant so much. It gave me confidence and the belief that I was going to make it through this unpredictable journey. I had a unique idea that I could develop and build upon (legal endogeneity in the legislative and regulatory context). I also had a mentor in place at the end of my first year in graduate school. I felt so fortunate.
My dissertation explored how public legal rights established by public institutions (courts, legislators, regulators) become privatized by private organizations and what impact this process had on consumer rights. The project attempted to bridge and integrate new institutional studies of law and organizations with political science studies of business influence in American politics and American political development. Because my project, in many respects, was trying to extend, refine, and to some extent, challenge Laurie's theoretical framework, it made for a unique mentorship relationship. Laurie was always explicit in encouraging me not to be afraid to challenge her work as I tried to find my own voice in the new institutional theory space. There was a period in graduate school where I visited Laurie's office hours almost every week for about 15 min. The meetings were short and substantive. I always came with a yellow notepad that included a short list of things to discuss. My lists ranged from scholarly questions to other professional development issues. She once told me, “I've never had a student come to office hours with a yellow note pad and agenda items listed.” I told her that I valued her time and did not want to waste a minute of it. Those scholarly conversations and debates are some of my best memories in graduate school. As I look back, I feel so privileged to have had Laurie as a sounding board in graduate school to talk with and bounce off ideas as I worked through finding my professional identity and voice.
Whenever I sent Laurie a draft of an article, it came back with substantive comments and constructive feedback. Whenever I asked Laurie questions, she tried as best as possible to help me with direct and honest feedback. When Laurie saw an opportunity that she thought was a great fit for me, she forwarded me the e-mail with advice on how to proceed. If Laurie thought a paper was worthy of winning a graduate student paper award, she nominated the paper. When I went to various law schools to interview for professor jobs, many of the interviews began with “Wow, your advisor wrote you an incredible letter of recommendation.” Laurie always had my back in meaningful and impactful ways. My story is not unique (as many of the contributions in this special issue echo this point). Laurie was an outstanding mentor to so many graduate students.
Besides formal mentoring, there was informal mentoring and the cultivation of a friendship with Laurie. During my first few years of graduate school, I often went to the JSP building to study and work on my research. No one was there on Saturdays—I finally had the little old building to myself! I would set up all my materials in the JSP Seminar Room and begin working. I showed up at 9 a.m. and I left at 5 p.m. During the Fall semester, I could hear the tailgating football fans arrive early for UC Berkeley's football game (the stadium is across from Berkeley Law and JSP). Usually, around 1 or 2 p.m., I'd hear a few dogs enter the building and they would walk upstairs. Laurie often stopped by her office for a few hours. She had her dogs near her as she worked in her office. In the late afternoon, I would stop by her office to say hello. She always invited me into her office and we talked about school, scholarship, and life. It was always a nice moment when it was just the two of us in the JSP building. Laurie was a special mentor because you always felt connected to her.
I am now a tenured faculty member at UC Irvine School of Law. Like many institutions, the University of California has a tenure standard that faculty are evaluated by after a certain number of years. In the UC system, we continue to be evaluated every three to 4 years for merit and promotion. The UC system has a large academic personnel handbook that lays out the rules and parameters for tenure and subsequent promotion. I will not bore everyone with the details but essentially a faculty member must show excellence and outstanding achievement in scholarship, teaching, and service. Faculty in the UC system are all aware of this standard and work toward trying to make the case when it is time for tenure, merit, and promotion review.
Truth be told, for me, this has never been the standard that I evaluate myself by. My standard has always been Laurie Edelman. Am I teaching at a level that Laurie would be proud of me? Am I producing rich, interesting, careful, quality scholarship in a way that would make Laurie proud and say, “Hey, you are doing really interesting and path-breaking work”? Am I a dedicated institutional citizen to my academic department, my institution, and the larger profession in the way that I have observed Laurie being? Am I a strong mentor and advocate for students? In other words, Laurie is my standard. She was in graduate school, she is today, and she will be every day moving forward. While I readily admit I can never surpass her achievement, she plays a crucial role in my professional life every single day. I cannot think of a greater compliment than having a mentor that is so tremendous in every facet of the academic job that someone uses that person as their personal benchmark. It gives me peace of mind that Laurie is my standard because it means every day that I walk into my office for the rest of my career, she is with me in spirit.
Thank you, Laurie, for being an incredible teacher, scholar, institutional citizen, and most importantly, human being.
