Professor Lauren Edelman, a leading figure in the sociology of law and organizations, passed away on February 7, 2023, after a brief and unexpected illness. A pathbreaking scholar, Edelman transformed both the sociolegal understanding of antidiscrimination law and the neoinstitutional understanding of organizational environments. Her sophisticated empirical research offered crucial insights into why civil rights laws often fail to generate meaningful social change, and her novel theoretical concepts of “legal endogeneity” and “managerialization” have become essential tools for analyzing how organizations institutionalize inequality and shape courtroom and workplace interpretations of legal compliance.
Edelman grew up in Madison, Wisconsin, the eldest daughter of political scientist Murray Edelman and ceramic artist Bacia Stepner Edelman. She earned her BA from the University of Wisconsin, her PhD in sociology from Stanford University, and her JD from the University of California-Berkeley. In 1986, she began her career on the sociology faculty at Wisconsin, returning to Berkeley in 1996 to become the Agnes Roddy Robb Professor of Law and Professor of Sociology.
An internationally recognized scholar, Edelman received too many honors to recount. Most prominently, her 2016 opus Working Law: Courts, Corporations, and Symbolic Civil Rights (University of Chicago Press) won top association-wide book awards, including the American Sociological Association’s 2018 Distinguished Scholarly Book Award and the Academy of Management’s 2017 George R. Terry Book Award. In 2018, she received the Law and Society Association’s highest research honor, the Harry J. Kalven, Jr. Prize for a body of “empirical scholarship that has contributed most effectively to the advancement of research in law and society.” In addition, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2022) and the Sociological Research Association (2007), and she received fellowships from the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.
Edelman was also a tireless institution builder and a leader in both the profession and the academy. She cofounded (1992) and chaired (1996–1997) the ASA Sociology of Law Section, and over the course of her career she held virtually every elected office in the Law and Society Association, including trustee (1993–1995 and 2019–2022), secretary (1997–1999), and president (2002–2003). At Berkeley, she directed the Center for the Study of Law and Society (2004–2009) and chaired the Jurisprudence and Social Policy program (2010–2013). She also served on the Board of Directors of the American Bar Foundation, on the National Science Foundation’s Law and Social Science Review Panel, and on the editorial boards of the American Sociological Review, the American Journal of Sociology, and the Annual Review of Law and Social Science.
Perhaps her most lasting contribution, however, lay in her dedicated cultivation of emerging scholars, for which she received the Law and Society Association’s Stan Wheeler Mentorship Award in 2017. A fierce advocate and beloved counselor, she advised generations of graduate students and junior faculty across the country on research design, grant writing, tenure, and publishing. In addition, she launched formal mentoring programs in both the ASA and the Law and Society Association, cofounded the American Bar Foundation/National Science Foundation Doctoral Fellowship Program in Law and Inequality, and led numerous summer institutes, didactic workshops, and professional development panels over the years.
Alongside these professional accomplishments, Edelman’s friends and colleagues will remember her humor, warmth, and zest for life. She loved birds, ferrets, and particularly dogs; she played Eastern European folk music on violin and gadulka; and she crafted stunning jewelry. Notoriously oblivious to the world of sports, she was fond of recounting how a certain college football coach had once pleaded that she “just had to” change his starting quarterback’s grade—to which she replied, in full sincerity, “What’s a quarterback?” Her infectious laugh, her wise counsel, and her steadfast friendship will be deeply missed.
Gifts to support programming in Professor Edelman’s memory can be made to the Jurisprudence and Social Policy Graduate Program, UC Berkeley, 2240 Piedmont Ave., Berkeley, CA 94720, or online at https://give.berkeley.edu/funddrive/105.
Mark Suchman, Brown University and The American Bar Foundation, and Catherine Albiston, University of California-Berkeley
Hugh Floyd, professor of sociology at Samford University died at his home in Westover, Alabama, on January 10, 2023, after a very short but devastating blow from cancer at the completion of his teaching for the fall semester. He was anticipating retirement in May 2023.
For more than fifty years, Floyd contributed to understanding and improving the human condition through his decades of scholarly research, his work as a clinical sociologist, and his teaching. His natural love for others marked his work and career as it did his life among his many colleagues, friends, and family.
Floyd was born in Malvern, Arkansas, and, due to his father’s Baptist ministry, lived in more than twenty cities across the south and midwestern United States before receiving his BA from Ouachita Baptist University. Following in his father’s footsteps, his own ministry began early as a preteen “boy preacher,” but he also became strongly attracted to scholarship. He partly supported himself through college by pastoring a small Baptist church in Arkansas. In 1966, Floyd entered the doctoral program in sociology at the University of Georgia (UGA). In 1968, while working as UGA Sociology Professor Paul Roman’s first graduate assistant, he developed his dissertation project, prescient of the contemporary issues relative to the stigma of mental illness.
After completing his PhD in 1970, Floyd joined the faculty of the University of New Orleans (then LSU in New Orleans) as an assistant professor of sociology. Floyd was promoted through the ranks to full professor, and he chaired the University of New Orleans (UNO) Department of Sociology. Hugh retired from UNO and moved to Samford University in 1993 as professor of sociology and chair of the Department of Sociology.
At Samford, Floyd became known as the “environment guy.” His students found his energy toward social justice inspiring in so many areas, especially the environment. Floyd coauthored “Modernity and Anniston’s Transformation from ‘Model City’ to ‘Toxic Town’”—written with his eldest son, M. Ryan Floyd, professor and chair of the History Department at Lander University and published in the July 2016 issue of The Alabama Review—and coauthored Bodies in Protest: Environmental Illness and the Struggle over Medical Knowledge (NYU Press 1997) with Steve Kroll-Smith.
Floyd published more than thirty articles, book chapters, and books, and presented innumerable papers at professional meetings. At the time of his passing, Floyd was working on a book with his son, Ryan.
An important facet of Floyd’s professional life was his private practice of clinical sociology, through which he helped individuals and families navigate the challenges of life. Floyd launched a practice while in New Orleans that meaningfully applied sociological frameworks to disruptive personal and family issues. While he was an important pioneer in clinical sociology, this involvement never overshadowed his commitment and involvement in academic teaching and research.
Floyd was active in professional organizations. He was a founding member and regular participant of the Mid-South Sociological Association and active in the Southern Sociological Society; Alpha Kappa Delta, the International Sociology Honor Society; the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy; Alabama Marriage and Family Therapy Association; American Board of Medical Psychotherapists; and Phi Gamma Mu, the International Honor Society in Social Sciences.
Floyd is survived by his wife, Paula; two sons, M. Ryan, Lander University (Greenwood, South Carolina), and Stephen (Westover, Alabama), a middle school social sciences teacher; as well as five grandchildren.
Hugh Floyd, one of the good guys in higher education and in life, left too soon and will be missed.
Dennis R. McSeveney, University of New Orleans; Theresa Davidson, Samford University; and Paul Roman, University of Georgia
In Memory of My Graduate Students: Death and Mentoring
By Helen Moore, Aaron Douglas Professor Emerita, Department of Sociology, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
I have been mentoring graduate students for over four decades at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln (UNL). It devastates me that four of my gay and/or Black graduate students have lost their lives right before or after completing their degrees. These deaths have profoundly impacted my mentoring over the decades, but Yolanda Dillon’s recent violent murder in New Orleans brought on renewed grieving. I am writing this in memory of my marginalized colleagues who died too early.
Yolanda Dillion (died 2022) studied economically marginalized people of color when there is no work available. She earned her MA degree from Tulane University and after earning her UNL ABD designation, Yolanda moved back to New Orleans. She discovered her breast cancer (early enough to survive), while caretaking her elderly mother who was also cancer stricken. Yolanda held two jobs, one as a statistical analyst for the New Orleans Police Department, and one as an Uber driver. She was the victim of a random urban murder when a male passenger stabbed her to death from the back seat during an Uber trip. For Yolanda’s family and the Black community, the tragedy of her murder was multiplied by the uploading of videos that the passenger took of her dying.
Cheryl Applegate (died 2000) was a proud Black, lesbian, civil rights activist who came to UNL after a long history devoted to making social change. As an ABD student, she undertook full-time teaching at Nebraska Wesleyan University in Lincoln. She was a committed, joyous teacher whose late diagnosis of colon cancer whittled away her life. We annually award our best Sociology graduate student teachers of intersections of race, class, and gender classes the Cheryl Applegate Award so that we can say her name.
Joel Brodsky, PhD, (died 1989) completed his dissertation “Controlling Sickness: The Political Economy of Gay Men’s Health Care,” despite battling HIV/AIDS. Joel understood the institutionalized health care and politics that made his life vulnerable, that forced him to retake his doctoral exams because although his writing was well cited, it was considered “too political.” Joel dedicated his dissertation in memoriam to naming of friends dying from AIDS “who taught me that death is a more compelling enemy than domination.”
Vanetta Aaron (died 1997) was an MA student who was told by medical personnel that her troubled breathing was “due to her obesity.” Climbing the seven flights of stairs to our department, she later collapsed and soon after died in hospital from undiagnosed hypertension and heart failure. We established the annual Vanetta Aaron Inequality Paper Award given to a Sociology undergraduate so that each year we can say her name.
Supporting Students
Here are some recommendations for supervising graduate faculty members and graduate chairs to help them support their minority graduate students. A department discussion could further help establish guidelines based on your needs:
- Ensure that all graduate students have university funded health insurance.
- Listen—really listen—for graduate student health and mental health concerns and provide them with careful referrals. Encourage active engagement in health screening and prevention, while maintaining professional boundaries.
- Assess and enhance the diversity of minority providers among mental health and health professionals on campus and enlarge this to include community providers. Know those who serve as trusted mentors outside of the academy.
- Inspect your department graduate guidelines and amend these to provide flexibility for chronic or acute minority health issues.
- Actively engage your campus-wide graduate office in extending filing deadlines and financial support for vulnerable students with compromised health issues.
- Learn about specific local hospital charities that assist in covering unexpected hospital costs.
- Enhance your own skill sets for meeting the needs of our marginalized students. Crisis work is not for the unskilled. Get training and then volunteer for at least one year on a community or national crisis line (sexual assault, domestic violence, suicide, mental health, LGBTQ, substance abuse, veterans, refugee trauma survivors, etc.).
- Review the crisis hotlines and resources from the American Psychological Association.
Faculty are not taught basic verbal and listening skills for noticing and caring about students and then providing supportive referrals. Sociologists can work to reduce the ratio of deaths among our marginalized graduate students who bend our disciplinary arc toward justice in the academy and in our communities.
Any opinions expressed in the articles in this publication are those of the author and not the American Sociological Association.
