Marc Galanter, 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.
Prof 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 has authored numerous books and articles related to law, the legal profession and the provision of legal services in 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) and Law and Society in Modern India (1989).
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. A leading figure in the empirical study of the legal system, he has taught South Asian Law; Law and Social Science; Legal Profession; Religion and the Law; Contracts; Dispute Processing; and Negotiations. He has lectured at more than eighty universities in the United States and abroad. In addition to the University of Wisconsin and the London School of Economics, he has taught at Chicago, Buffalo, Columbia, and Stanford.