Stephen L. Wasby received his B.A. from Antioch College and his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Oregon, where he was a National Defense Education Act Fellow. He held a Russell Sage Post-Doctoral Residency in Law and Social Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

He was on the faculty at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale from 1966 through 1978 before moving to the University at Albany - SUNY, where he is professor emeritus of political science. He is also Visiting Scholar at the University of Massachusetts - Dartmouth. He now resides in Eastham, Massachusetts.

He has been visiting professor at the University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee; the Faculty of Law at the University of Victoria (B.C.); and the U.S. Naval Academy, where he was Secretary of the Navy Fellow; and the University of Toronto, and he held the Bissell-Fulbright Chair in Canadian-American Relations at the University of Toronto.

He served as director of the Law and Social Science Program at the National Science Foundation; has regularly taught a seminar on dissertation-proposal writing; and served as a member of the Institutional Review Board at the University at Albany.

Professor Wasby’s research interests focus primarily on the federal courts and on the role of interest groups in litigation. He is now engaged in a long-term project on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. He is the author of a number of books, including The Supreme Court in the Federal Judicial System and Race Relations Litigation in an Age of Complexity, as well as articles in social science journals and law reviews.

He is Editor-in-Chief of Justice System Journal, on whose editorial board he has served for thirty years and for which he was Review Editor and Legal Notes Editor. He has served on the editorial boards of American Politics Quarterly, Polity, Law and Society Review, and Western Legal History.