Samuel Krislov, age 95, died in his sleep on August 11, 2025 at his home in Arlington, Virginia. Sam had a long and illustrious career. Born in Cleveland, OH in 1929, he received his BA and MA at New York University, and his PhD at Princeton in 1955. He taught for short stints at several universities, before moving to the University of Minnesota in 1964, where he taught in the Political Science Department, and held adjunct positions in the School of Law, and the Program in Ancient and Near Middle Eastern Studies, until his retirement in 2001. His long tenure at Minnesota was punctuated by frequent visiting appointments, including at Columbia, Northwestern, Brandeis, and the School of Law at the University of California, Berkeley. An inveterate comparativist, he received a number of Fulbright Fellowships and teaching appointments to more than a dozen universities throughout the world.
A political scientist keenly interested in the well-being of his profession, Sam was active in both the American Political Science Association and the Midwest Political Science Association. He was Program Chair for the 1967 annual meeting of the MPSA, and its President from 1975 to 1977. He was an APSA Council member between 1971 and 1973, and served as chair-elect and chair for the organized Section on Law and Courts from 1993 to 1996. He was founding editor of the journal Teaching Political Science (now Perspectives on Politics) from 1973-1778. A stalwart of the Law and Courts Section of the Association, Sam edited a special issue of Review of Politics on the theme in 1992, and received the Section’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 1998.
Everywhere he went, Sam helped to develop institutions. He chaired the Political Science Department at Minnesota in its heyday in the late ‘60s and ‘70s. One of his proudest achievements was to help found the Political Science Department at the then-new University of Tel Aviv. He was appointed by the National Academy of Sciences to chair its then-new and still on-going Committee on Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice; he was an active consultant and author for the California Judicial Council’s project on the Future of California Courts; he was a frequent visiting lecturer in the Masters of Judicial Studies Program at the University of Nevada, Reno and the National Judicial College. He was a consultant to a great many organizations, local, state, national, and international, where he was always welcomed and much appreciated for his ability to listen, synthesize, summarize in the process of sharpening issues and finding solutions.
He was also a welcome commentator at professional meetings, university and civic public associations, and as an expert witness and editor. A quick learner, he had an uncanny ability to synthesize issues and get to the point, thus contributing clarification and moving any discussion along. He did this in the seminar room, on conference room floors, as a consultant, and as an editor.
He is remembered by members of the Law & Society Association as one of its founders, as the second editor of the Law & Society Review, and as the fourth president of the association. During his editorship, the Review expanded from an ad hoc publication to its standard quarterly format with an increased size, readership, and prestige. Under his editorship, it became the journal of choice for scholars interested in empirical research in sociolegal studies. Amid its early years, the association piggy-backed its meetings on the shoulders of well-established organizations. But, as president of the association, Sam took the initiative and financial and reputational risk of announcing that the meeting he was organizing in Minneapolis was the first annual free-standing meeting. It was a roaring success, drew many more attendees than expected and brought a great many people into the association. He also took the initiative to build bridges with the National Science Foundation, which developed a special program to support research in law and the behavioral sciences, a relationship with the Law and Society Association that continues to this day.
Sam was quick, curious, productive, and gregarious. He often saw patterns and implications before anyone else. So far as we know he published the first game theoretical analysis of coalition formation in the US Supreme Court. His book exploring racial segregation and integration in the federal bureaucracy revealed that older agencies are more resistant to change than newer agencies (e.g., in the ’70s, the Navy was much more segregated than the Air Force). He explored and accounted for this pattern long before the new institutionalists in organization theory even noticed the issue. His book and articles on product standards constitute an account of the successes of private regulation and are the definitive work on the subject. Sam’s co-edited National Research Council report on forecasting the impact of legislation on courts remains the authoritative statement on the topic.
In total, Sam published 19 authored, edited, co-authored or co-edited books on a variety of topics, including judicial behavior, the judicial process, constitutional law and history, public administration, as well as dozens of articles on these topics, and still more entries in dictionaries, handbooks, and encyclopedias. Many of them were reprinted, and many were co-authored or co-edited. The two of us, his former students, are proud to have been collaborators and co-authors on some of these many projects.
Sam is survived by his wife of four decades, Dr. Judith Gillespie, and his five children, Sheri, Anne, Dan, Melanie, and Lee, with his first wife, the late Donna Krislov; nine grandchildren; and one great grandchild. Ever the mentor, Sam is also survived by generations of students, who have benefited from his unfailing interest, even to the point of offering career assistance and advice long after their leaving Minnesota. And ever the collaborator and intellectual partner, he is survived by the Sociologists, Anthropologists, Political Scientists, Economists, and Law professors whose work was unfailingly enriched by Sam’s insights. The scholar of impact analysis, among so many other things, Sam surely left an impact on those fortunate enough to have known him. Sam Krislov will surely be missed, but he will even more surely long be remembered.
