William L. F. Felstiner (born December 14, 1929), usually known as Bill Felstiner, is a socio-legal scholar. Education and early career Bill Felstiner was born in New York, and graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy and Yale College. He received his LL.B. from Yale Law School in 1958. In 1965, he was hired as Regional Legal Advisor of the USAID Mission to Greece & Turkey and in due course appointed Assistant Director of the US AID Mission to India (until 1968). Teaching and Research In 1969, Bill Felstiner started a university teaching career as Associate Dean and Lecturer at Yale Law School. While at Yale he helped direct the Yale Program in Law and Modernization. In 1973 he joined UCLA as Assistant Professor. In 1976 he decided to devote full-time to research, working, first, at the USC's Social Science Research Institute, then at the Rand Corporation's Civil Justice Institute and, finally, at the American Bar Foundation, of which he was executive director. While at USC he served as co-PI of the US Justice Department-funded Civil Litigation Research Project. Then he moved back to teaching and to the university. After teaching in Political Science at Northwestern University, he became professor of sociology in the Law and Society Program at the University of California, Santa Barbara (1992–1999). In the years 2000-2003 he was director of the International Institute for the Sociology of Law in Oñati (Gipuzkoa, Spain). From 1995-2005 he also held the position of Distinguished Research Professor of Law at Cardiff University (Wales, UK). Areas of special interest In his early work, Bill Felstiner focussed on alternative ways to solve conflicts (avoidance, mediation, litigation etc.), touring Western Europe for possible models both in criminal and civil procedure. He continued his interest in litigation and alternatives to litigation as co-PI of the Civil Litigation Research Project (CLRP)a joint venture of USC and the University of Wisconsin funded by the US Department of Justice, conducted a major study of litigation in federal courts and the operation of alternative fora for civil disputes. Felstiner participated in all aspects of CLRP's work and (together with Rick Abel and Austin Sarat), developed the idea of a disputes pyramid and the formula "naming, blaming, claiming", which refers to different stages of conflict resolution and levels of the pyramid. At Rand's Civil Justice Institute, he initiated a long-term investigation into asbestos litigation. After that he concentrated his organizational and