This book captures fifteen episodes in Bill Felstiner's life as student, naval officer, lawyer, government official, law school administrator, participant observer, teacher, disaster and relief administrator, boat person, dog owner, and book collector. The narrative stretches from Antarctica to the Beaufort Sea, from the lush estates of Santa Barbara to refugee camps in Chad and Red Cross shelters in Louisiana. It includes the inside story of politically important litigation, detailed descriptions of path breaking social research, analyses of questionable behavior at elite institutions, reflections on social attitudes and practices and chapters on his encounters with boats, books and dogs.




Bill Felstiner is a graduate of Yale College and the Yale Law School. He taught law at UCLA and sociology at UCSB. He was the Director of the American Bar Foundation and of the International Institute for the Sociology of Law. He was a Distinguished Research Professor of Law at Cardiff University and a Fellow of the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies at Oxford. He is the author or editor of eight books and more than seventy scholarly papers.