Joseph Gusfield passed away on January 5, 2015 at the age of 91. Joe was one of the pioneers of the American Sociology of Law. He taught at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, the University of Chicago, and the University of Illinois, and then was the founding Chair of the Sociology Department at the University of California, San Diego. After retiring from UCSD, he moved to the Bay Area, and, became a Distinguished Affiliated Scholar at Berkeley’s Center for the Study of Law and Society. Joe’s work was at the forefront of scholarship on the social, cultural, and political construction of social problems. He is especially well known for Symbolic Crusade: Status Politics and the American Temperance Movement, and, The Culture of Public Problems: Drinking-Driving and the Symbolic Order.
Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction Blog 