Yale Bulletin and Calendar

January 11, 2008|Volume 36, Number 14

Stanton Wheeler

In Memoriam: Stanton Wheeler

Musician, master, sociologist and sports fan

Stanton Wheeler, a pioneer in socio-legal studies who was one of the first non-lawyers to serve as a tenured professor at the Yale Law School, died on Dec. 7 of complications from a cardiovascular condition. He was 77 years old.

Wheeler, who also served for six years as the master of Morse College, was the Ford Foundation Professor Emeritus of Law and Social Sciences and professorial lecturer in law at the Law School at the time of his death.

A sociologist, his research and teaching interests included the administration of criminal justice, white-collar crime, the sociology of law, sports and the law, and music and the law. He authored or edited 10 books and many articles on these topics, including “Sitting in Judgment: The Sentencing of White Collar Criminals” (with Kenneth Mann and Austin Serat), “Crimes of the Middle Classes: White Collar Offenders in the Federal Courts” (with David Weisburd, Elin Waring and Nancy Bode), “Doing Justice: The Choice of Punishments” (with Andrew Von Hirsch), “On Record: Files and Dossiers in American Life” and “Social Science in the Making: Essays on the Russell Sage Foundation.”

In remarks he made at Wheeler’s burial ceremony, Law School Dean Harold Hongju Koh commented: “He pioneered the integration of law and social science, turning the focus away from rules and judicial doctrines toward empirical studies of how legal actors actually behave. His early comparative work examined how prisons actually function in the United States and Scandinavia. He then conducted the first empirical study of how the caseloads of American state supreme courts have evolved over time. As director of the Yale White-Collar Crime Project, he asked how to further better social control of white-collar crime, by looking closely at why middle-class people actually commit crimes and how judges choose to sentence them.”

From 1982 to 1991, Wheeler was director and editor of the Yale Studies on White-Collar Crime. During much of his time at Yale, he was also on the staff of the Russell Sage Foundation, directing programs in the emerging field of socio-legal scholarship — the study of the impact of legal decisions on social institutions. He also studied juvenile delinquency, among other topics.

As master of Morse College 1995-2001, Wheeler and his wife, associate master Marcia Chambers, were known for creating a sense of community in the college.

“Stan and Marcia took to this vocation with energy, grace, style — and a sense of fun,” said Penelope Laurens, associate dean of Yale College and special assistant to the president. “Together they formed an unbeatable team, putting Morse on the undergraduate map, forging a true community, hosting scores of study breaks, teas and other events, making their Morse house a center of music and fun, becoming mentors and friends and confidantes to ‘Morsels’ from every part of the country and world.”

On a Law School website page devoted to remembrances of Wheeler, other colleagues reminisced about his passion for jazz music and sports, his friendliness and generosity, in addition to his meticulous research methods.

Wheeler served as chair of the Faculty Committee on Athletics for eight years, and from 1985 to 1987 he took a leave from Yale to serve as president of the Amateur Athletic Foundation of Los Angeles, a private, non-profit institution created by the Los Angeles Olympic Organizing Committee to manage Southern California’s endowment from the 1984 Olympics. The foundation used profits from the Olympics to create sports programs for inner-city and disabled youngsters throughout southern California.

“In Yale sports, he was ‘Stan the Man,’” said Koh at the graveside ceremony for Wheeler. “He loved golf and played it all over the world. He was part of the Yale Law School faculty basketball team that included Denny Curtis, Geoff Hazard and the late John Hart Ely. … He loved sports and attended an enormous number of sporting events. Not just the big sports, like football and hockey, but the smaller sports that were less well attended. He led the group that worked on the University’s NCAA certificate earlier this decade.”

Born in Pomona, California, on Sept. 27, 1930, Wheeler was the youngest of George and Margaret Starbird Wheeler’s four children. His father was a lawyer. Although the teenaged Stanton Wheeler dreamed of being a jazz musician , his experience playing with black jazz musicians in what was then called Los Angeles’ “Negro District” led him to major in race relations and sociology at Pomona College, from which he graduated in 1952. He received a master’s degree and Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Washington, where he also began his teaching career. In 1958, he joined the faculty at Harvard University, taking a leave two years later to go to Norway on a Fulbright Scholarship to study the Scandinavian prison system. He returned to Harvard and taught there until 1968, when he was invited to join the Yale law faculty.

During his career, Wheeler also served as a member and then as chair of the National Academy of Science/National Research Council’s Committee on Law Enforcement and the Administration of Justice and as a member of the Committee on Law and Social Science of the Social Science Research Council.

For many years, he served on the research committee of the American Bar Foundation and was its chair at the time of his death. He also served on the Law and Society Panel of the National Science Foundation. In 2004, the American Bar Foundation recognized Wheeler’s lifetime achievements by honoring him with its Outstanding Scholar Award, given annually to an individual who has engaged in outstanding scholarship in the law or in government.

On the Yale campus, Wheeler shared his love of jazz music with friends and colleagues. He was a member for many years of the Yale Jazz Ensemble, and at the time of his death was part of its trumpet section. In the 1990s, he played the part of Harry James in Yale’s Glenn Miller Jazz Band, performing at Yale and with the band in Europe as part of the 50th anniversary of D-Day. He played trumpet, flugelhorn and cornet with the Reunion Jazz Ensemble, the King Street Stompers and, on occasion, with the Clamdiggers — the band that played at his funeral.

These music groups will perform at a jazz concert hosted by the Law School in Wheeler’s memory on Sunday, April 13, at a time and location to be announced later.

In addition to his wife, Wheeler is survived by three sons from a first marriage to Mary Lou Reyen: Steven, of Tualatin, Oregon; Warren, of Huntington, England; and Kenneth, of New Haven. He is also survived by his sister, Nancy Dayton, of Los Gatos, California; his brother, Alvin, of Honolulu, Hawaii; and five grandchildren.

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