In Memorium: Joel F. Handler

 

 It is with sadness that I report the death of Joel Handler, one of the legal academic giants of a generation that is now passing. His obituary follows.

Joel F. Handler

1932-2022

 

Joel F. Handler died on September 22, 2022. Joel was born in Newark, NJ on October 4, 1932. After graduating from Princeton in 1954, he attended Harvard Law School. 

 

Following a clerkship and then practicing law with his father Charles Handler and his brother, Alan Handler, Joel went into teaching. Joel spent two decades on the faculty of the University of Wisconsin Law School, where he was the George Wiley and Vilas Research Professor as well as a critical member of the Institute for Research on Poverty. He joined the UCLA faculty in 1985, holding the Richard C. Maxwell Chair before retiring in 2010. 

 

The author of 23 monographs, Joel was one of the world’s leading scholars of social welfare law and a giant in the law and society movement, serving as the president of the Law and Society Association from 1991 to 1993. His 1996 book Down from Bureaucracy: The Ambiguity of Privatization and Empowerment won the Gladys M. Kammerer Award for the best political science publication in the field of national policy. Joel received many awards and fellowships, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a German Marshall Fund grant, and a Rockefeller Foundation Residency in Bellagio, Italy, and, in 2004, election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Joel chaired the National Academy of Sciences’ panels on the Status of Black America and High-Risk Youth.

 

Joel is survived by his beloved wife of 36 years, Betsy Handler, a retired public interest attorney. He is survived by his brother Alan Handler, a former Justice of the New Jersey Supreme Court; his brother Mark Handler predeceased him. Joel is survived by his three children and their spouses: Stephen, a retired lawyer living in Wisconsin, married to Changge; Adam, a lawyer, living in Pacific Palisades, married to Ann; and his daughter Frances Handler-Igna, a psychologist in Putnam Valley, NY, married to Loan. In addition, Joel had six grandchildren: Kate Abrey, Jeff Handler, Lane Stewart, Lydia Igna, Samantha Handler, and ChenChen Handler. A little over a year ago, Joel became a great-grandfather to Cooper Stewart and will soon be a great-grandfather to Kate and Ian’s twin boys. Also deeply loved by Joel were his niece and nephew Rachel and Neil Marcus and their children Alexandra and Nathaniel.

 

Contributions in Joel’s memory may be made to the University of Wisconsin Law School and/or to the Epstein Public Interest Law Program at UCLA.

 

Joel Handler contributed greatly to the reshaping of the discourses of power, and the topographies of its exercise by bureaucrats and market participants within institutions of economic, social, and politically coercive power.  He was skeptical of market power, but perhaps only a little less so of abuses of administrative discretion.  Finding the sweet spot of empowering the power within system in which the empowerment of institutions was first on the agenda proved to be never ending task, one that has yet to find a satisfactory conceptual or operational equilibrium whether in liberal democratic, Marxist-Leninist, or post-colonial developing state systems. Nonetheless, the language and lens he provided have played  and will continue to play an important role in the discourses of power within institutional ecologies.