Marc Galanter
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- For the psychiatry professor see Marc Galanter (psychiatrist)
Marc Galanter is the John and Rylla Bosshard Professor of Law and South Asian Studies at the University of Wisconsin Law School and LSE Centennial Professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He teaches South Asian Law, Law and Social Science, Legal Profession, Religion and the Law, Contracts, Dispute Processing and Negotiations. He has authored numerous books and articles related to law, the legal profession and the provision of legal services in India.
Galanter is the author of a number of highly regarded 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), a noted 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.
He is also recognized as a leading American student of the Indian legal system. He is the author of Competing Equalities: Law and the Backward Classes in India (1984, 1991), and Law and Society in Modern India (1989, 1992). 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 India in the litigation arising from the Bhopal disaster. 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 and 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 University of Chicago. In addition to the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the London School of Economics, he has taught at Chicago, Buffalo, Columbia, and Stanford.
Marc Galanter has been married to Eve Galanter since 1967. Eve Galanter received the YWCA of Madison Woman of Distinction Award in May 2007. They have three children: Seth Galanter, a prominent appellate attorney at Morrison & Foerster in Washington, DC; Rachel Galanter, an award-winning Family Support Specialist and Program Manager in Durham, NC; and Sarah Galanter, a highly-acclaimed public school teacher in Madison, WI.
