Lauren B. Edelman

Lauren Beatrice Edelman (May 11, 1955 – February 7, 2023) was an American sociologist. She was a professor at University of Wisconsin–Madison and the UC Berkeley School of Law, becoming the Agnes Roddy Robb Professor of Law and Sociology at the latter. A sociologist of law and organizations, she won the 2018 American Sociological Association Distinguished Scholarly Book Award for her 2016 Working Law: Courts, Corporations and Symbolic Civil Rights. She was a 2000 Guggenheim Fellow and 2022 Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and was president of the Law and Society Association from 2002 to 2003. Biography Lauren Beatrice Edelman was born on May 11, 1955, in Urbana, Illinois.

Originally majoring in music at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, Edelman later changed her major to sociology, was supervised by John W. Meyer and William Richard Scott. as well as chair of the American Sociological Association's Sociology of Law Section from 1996 to 1997. Her book, Working Law: Courts, Corporations and Symbolic Civil Rights, was released by University of Chicago Press in November 2016. It won several awards: the ASA Sociology of Law Section's 2017 Distinguished Book Award, the 2017 Academy of Management George R. Terry Book Award, and the 2018 ASA Distinguished Scholarly Book Award.

In 2000, Edelman was elected a Guggenheim Fellow "for a study of the formation of civil rights law in the workplace". She also held fellowships at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University and the Rockefeller Center at Villa Serbelloni. and was an elected member of the Sociological Research Association.