What Happens In India When You Get Hurt?: Indian Tort Law
Marc Galanter is the 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, studies litigation, lawyers, and legal culture. 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,” 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) which is widely viewed as the most robust explanation of the growth and transformation of large law firms. 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 (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 & 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 and the London School of Economics, he has taught at Chicago, Buffalo, Columbia, and Stanford.
This lecture is co-sponsored by Global Legal Studies Center and the South Asia Legal Studies Working Group