Lauren Edelman ’86

One of many Berkeley Law alums to return to teach on its faculty, Edelman held a Ph.D in sociology and was a cornerstone of the esteemed Center for the Study of Law and Society and the Jurisprudence and Social Policy (JSP) graduate program.

Widely recognized outside Berkeley Law — earning a Guggenheim Fellowship and serving as president of the Law and Society Association, to name just two — Edelman was also a beloved and influential teacher, adviser, and mentor to students, particularly in the JSP, who continue her legacy today.

Edelman, who joined the Berkeley Law faculty in 1996, was internationally known as a powerhouse scholar. Her original, pathbreaking research investigated how work organizations respond to civil rights laws that were intended to prohibit discrimination in the workplace. 

A pioneer for her research on the interplay between organizations and their legal environments and for expanding the field of neo-institutional organizational theory, Edelman developed the widely acclaimed theory of legal endogeneity — how courts come to defer to organizational responses to law as the definition of compliance, rather than determining what compliance means independently. 

Edelman’s argument was that when laws like anti-discrimination statutes are ambiguous, organizations create their own methods of compliance that don’t disrupt any actual practices on the ground. Then, when employees sue, organizations point to the symbolic moves as the standard of compliance, effectively making an end run around enforcement of a concrete policy.

Her field-defining book in the area, Working Law: Courts, Corporations, and Symbolic Civil Rights, received the 2017 George R. Terry Book Award from the Academy of Management. Edelman won a Guggenheim Fellowship, served as both secretary and president of the Law & Society Association (LSA), and chaired the American Sociological Association’s Sociology of Law section. 

She won the LSA’s Harry J. Kalven Prize and Stanton Wheeler Mentorship Award and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2022.

At Berkeley Law, she led the Center for the Study of Law and Society from 2004 to 2009 and was the school’s Associate Dean for the Ph.D.-granting Jurisprudence & Social Policy Program (JSP) from 2010 to 2013. In 2020, she co-founded the Center for Law and Work with Professors Catherine Albiston J.D. ’93 Ph.D. ’01 and Catherine Fisk ’86. 

After Edelman’s death in 2023, several of her JSP colleagues put together the remarks they gave at her memorial service for an article published in a special issue of the Law & Society Review, the LSA’s journal. They called it “Learning from Laurie Edelman,” and its three components are a cheat sheet for understanding her legacy. 

Albiston J.D. ’93, an Edelman student, discusses learning the “hidden curriculum” of academia from Edelman, and how she demystified the processing of thinking and working like a scholar for so many. 

Professor Osagie K. Obasogie, whom Edelman advised while earning his Ph.D. in UC Berkeley’s Department of Sociology, wrote movingly of walking with her around their neighborhood during the COVID-19 pandemic — highlighting how her diligent efforts to get her dog to befriend him echoed Edelman’s lifelong devotion to both scholarship and giving to others. 

In the final section, Professor Calvin Morrill describes Edelman’s long history of working collaboratively, and the ways in which it made him and many other co-authors better researchers. 

Edelman’s work is important for at least three reasons, Albiston says. First, it speaks to why discrimination and inequality in employment persist after more than 50 years of employment civil rights law. Second, her theory of legal endogeneity underscores how judicial deference to symbolic compliance eviscerates top-down regulation, so that regulated organizational entities, not the courts, come to define “endogenously” what compliance with law means.

Third, Edelman moved institutional organizational theory into a more critical realm. 

“Her subtle research demonstrated that not all was what it seemed in work organizations’ responses to law,” Albiston says. “It gave rise to a new field of research focused on whether organizational responses to law symbolically signaled compliance to outside regulators but obscured how organizations resisted any substantive change within their doors.”

Edelman’s dedication to mentorship is easily visible at Berkeley Law today: Many of her students, including Albiston, Obasogie, Professors Asad Rahim Ph.D. ’19 and Diana Reddy Ph.D. ’23, and Human Rights Center Co-Faculty Director Alexa Koenig Ph.D. ’13, returned to the school for their own academic careers. Others, like University of Massachusetts Amherst Professor Jamie Rowen J.D. ’09 Ph.D. ’12 and Boston University Law School Professor Yan Fang J.D. ’11 Ph.D. ’24, continue to spread her legacy outside Berkeley. 

“Lauren Edelman was an incredible scholar, and she was a beautiful human being. She believed in the research process and was meticulous with her methods and her data,” says Reddy, whose own work centers on work and employment law. “At the same time, she was radically inclusive, welcoming new folks into the fold, and sincerely interested in what you had to say, whether you were a new undergraduate student or the leading scholar in your field.”

About the Series

The Legends of Berkeley Law series highlights scholars whose ideas helped establish one of the world’s most intellectually influential law schools. Through pathbreaking research, innovative teaching, and institutional leadership, these faculty members reshaped major fields of law and inspired generations of lawyers, judges, policymakers, and academics.