ABA to honor professor with Robert B. McKay Award

The American Bar Association Tort Trial and Insurance Practice Section (TIPS) will honor Marc Galanter, professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Law, with its Robert B. McKay Award, which recognizes law professors who have shown commitment to the advancement of justice, scholarship and the legal profession, demonstrated by outstanding contributions to the fields of tort, trial practice or insurance law.
The award will be presented at the ABA Midyear Meeting in Las Vegas during the TIPS Reception on Saturday, Jan. 26, from 6:30-8 p.m. at Caesars Palace.

“Marc Galanter is a leading figure in the empirical study of the legal system,” said TIPS chair Roy Alan Cohen. “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. It is with great pride that we honor him with this award.”

Galanter, who studied litigation, lawyers and legal culture, was 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. He has also taught at Chicago, Buffalo, Columbia and Stanford law schools. Galanter was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Delhi, a Fellow of the American Institute of Indian Studies and consultant on legal services to the Ford Foundation in India.

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.” 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).

Much of his early work was on India. He is 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” and “Law and Society in Modern India”. He 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.

Galanter received his M.A. and J.D. from the University of Chicago.