William Sheffield (judge)
William Sheffield is an American attorney and retired judge in the state of California. He was a general legal counsel for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the Asia Area of the church and was closely connected with the sending of Mormon missionaries to India by the church in the late-20th century. Sheffield has also served as a judge in the Superior Courts of California, Orange County.
Sheffield earned his undergraduate degree from California State University, Long Beach. and then attended law school at the University of California, Berkeley.
From 1983 to 1985 Sheffield was a judge on the Superior Court of California, sitting in Orange County. He also served as a member of Indira Gandhi's defense team in the late 1970s. In 1985, Sheffield resigned his judgeship and went to Yale Divinity School. At the time Sheffield began attending services of the Methodist Church. His wife was a Latter-day Saint.
Sheffield's investigations of Mormonism while at Yale lead him to enroll at Brigham Young University, which had created a graduate program in theology for his study. He did much of his work at BYU under Joseph Fielding McConkie and eventually joined the LDS Church, whereupon he returned to Yale where he completed his divinity degree.
After that, he worked as the LDS Church's legal counsel in Asia where he used his connections with Rajiv Gandhi to get LDS Church missionaries allowed into that country.
Sheffield was also the person who initially spearheaded the donations by several Latter-day Saints to Dr. ADSN Prasad's Pathway Centers for Mentally and Physically Disabled Children in Chennai, India.
Upon completion of his assignment for the Church in 1990, Sheffield returned to Southern California where he has been an active mediator/arbitrator, having conducted over 5000 mediations and arbitrations, now exclusively with Judicate West. Sheffield has been named among the Top Twenty Neutrals in California by the Daily Journal. He has also been named among the Top Lawyers in America.
Since his retirement, Sheffield has been hired by the Los Angeles Unified School District to investigate complaints of retaliatory suspensions of students for actions by their parents in a San Fernando Valley Middle School.
Sheffield wrote the article "Voices from the Dust" in the Encyclopedia of Mormonism.
