Learning from Laurie Edelman

Abstract

Faculty members, students, policymakers, practitioners, and laypersons will learn from Laurie Edelman's brilliant scholarship for generations to come. She developed not only a new theory and a conceptual vocabulary for understanding the interplay of law and organizations—think, “legal endogeneity,” “managerialization of law,” or “symbolic structures” (Edelman, 2016)—but also a more precise account of the mutual influence between law and society. In this essay, we hold her scholarly contributions aside for a moment to explore what the three of us learned from Laurie in two of her most cherished professional roles as mentor and research collaborator. In many ways, she seemed happiest in these roles, whether advising students and early-career faculty (especially those most likely to be marginalized in academic circles, such as persons identifying as women and/or LGBTQ+, persons of color, persons with disabilities, or first-generation scholars) or working with scholars of diverse expertise and statuses on large, empirical projects.