The biannual Faculty Research Lecture is one of the highest honors bestowed by the UCLA Academic Senate for distinction in research.  For nine decades, the Faculty Research Lectures have presented the work of UCLA's most distinguished scholars to the campus community and the public.

The 102nd Faculty Research Lecturer is:

Reception immediately following at the UCLA Faculty Center

Inquiries: (310) 794-8494 Phone, or specialevents@support.ucla.edu

Lecture Synopsis

Profesor Yeazell will describe the forces that have reshaped civil litigation over the past fifty years. During this time, redressing or defending many common civil claims has become more expensive and more feasible, more complicated and fairer. But as long-standing problems have resolved themselves, their solutions have created more intensely isolated pockets of those without access to justice, systemic failures that require attention.

Biography

Stephen Yeazell joined the UCLA faculty in 1975, with a B.A. in English from Swarthmore College , an M.A. in English from Columbia University , and a J.D. from Harvard Law School . He served as a law clerk to Justice Mathew O. Tobriner of the California Supreme Court. Appointed Professor of Law in 1979, he has held the David G. Price & Dallas P. Price Chair in Law since 2001.

Professor Yeazell has done research in two fields. His early work, which focused on the history of the class action—organizing otherwise dispersed groups for the purposes of litigation purposes--culminated in From Medieval Group Litigation to the Modern Class Action (Yale University Press 1987). In it he argued that group litigation had roots going back to the Norman Conquest and that the current role of the class action goes back to the eighteenth century. The question of whether the class action had historical roots was a subject of substantial scholarly and political saliency at the time. His account has been widely accepted—cited, for example, in U.S. Supreme Court opinions.

Over the past 15 years, Professor Yeazell has focused on the topic of this afternoon's lecture: the evolution of civil procedure and civil litigation since 1900 and particularly during the past few decades. Pursuing this investigation, he has published a series of articles examining the ways in which changes in the legal profession, in the rules of procedure and in the financing of lawsuits, have transformed civil litigation. Carrying this research into the classroom, he has mounted new courses in contemporary civil litigation, in international civil litigation, and in comparative civil and criminal procedure.

Professor Yeazell has received the Rutter Award for Distinguished Law Teaching and the UCLA Alumni Association's Award for Distinguished Graduate Teaching. During his 32 years at UCLA, Prof. Yeazell has, he says, been “blessed” by a series of opportunities that have included service as Associate Dean of the School of Law and in several capacities in the Academic Senate—as a member of the Committee on Privilege & Tenure, the Council on Academic Personnel, and Chair of UCLA's Academic Senate. Each of these positions, he reports, has revealed to him a new facet of UCLA—“full of interesting, talented, remarkable, devoted—and occasionally contentious—students, faculty, staff, and administrators.” He describes each of these experiences as broadening his sense of the way in which different communities interpret the same data, and the ways in which norms, whether or not embodied in formal law, function to regulate behavior. He has, he says, tried to incorporate these insights into his scholarship.