2020 American Bar Foundation Fellows Outstanding Scholar Award

Lauren B. Edelman is Agnes Roddy Robb Professor of and Professor of at the University of California, Berkeley, where she teaches in the Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program (JSP). She has served as Associate Dean for JSP and as Director of the Center for the Study of Law & Society. She was previously Professor of Law and Sociology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. She holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from Stanford University and a J.D. from the University of California, Berkeley.

Edelman’s research addresses the interplay between organizations and their legal environments, focusing on employers’ responses to and constructions of civil rights , workers’ mobilization of legal rights, the impact of management practices on law and legal institutions, dispute resolution in organizations, school rights, empirical critical race studies, and employer accommodations of disabilities in the workplace. Her publications appear in the American Journal of Sociology, Law & Society Review, Law & Social Inquiry, Law & Policy, Annual Review of Sociology, Annual Review of Law and Social Science and edited volumes. Her recent book, Working Law: Courts, Corporations and Symbolic Civil Rights, won the Distinguished Scholarly Book Award from the American Sociological Association (ASA), the George R. Terry Book Award from the Academy of Management, the Distinguished Book Award from the Section of the ASA, and honorable mention for the C. Herman Pritchett Book Prize from the Law and Courts Section of the American Association. She has also received a number of awards from the Law and Society Association (LSA) including the Article Prize, the Stanton Wheeler Mentorship Award, and the Harry J. Kalven Prize. Edelman has also won a Guggenheim Fellowship, has twice been a fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, and was a fellow at the Rockefeller Center in Bellagio, Italy. She has served as trustee, secretary, and president of LSA, chaired the Sociology of Law section of the American Sociological Association, served on the Board of the American Bar Foundation, and was elected to the Sociological Research Association.