Judge Stephen F. Williams, 1936-2020

The field of administrative law has lost one of its most important and beloved figures, Judge Stephen F. Williams of the D.C. Circuit, who was 83 years old when he died on August 7, 2020. Since his appointment by President Reagan in 1986, Williams held a reputation as one of the nation's most formidable judicial minds in the realm of regulation. An early member of the law-and-economics movement during his years as a professor at the University of Colorado Law School (1969-1986), Williams became known on the bench for the economic sophistication of his opinions and for being the D.C. Circuit's foremost expert in that most complex and consequential area, energy law. While deciding cases about legal constraints on government as his day job, he undertook a years-long academic inquiry into the political and historical preconditions for any society to subject its government to law, writing two books on late tsarist Russia and its tragic failure to undertake liberal reform before it was too late.5 (To write these books, Williams embarked on learning Russian in his sixties.) On the court, Williams penned decisions that became part of the administrative law canon-required reading for law students across the country.