“After Stevens, law reviews were never the same,” Mr. Jarvis said. “It was a cultural revolution. It cannot be overstated.”

The much-misunderstood infield fly rule was adopted in the 1890s to prevent fielders from taking advantage of a force-out situation at third base. It states that when there are fewer than two outs, and there are men on first and second base, or the bases are loaded, any fly ball in fair territory that, in the judgment of the umpire, is catchable by an infielder “with ordinary effort” is automatically deemed an out, even if the fielder drops the ball. The rule prevents a fielder from intentionally misplaying a fly and then turning a double play by throwing out the runners anticipating a caught fly ball.

Mr. Stevens was intrigued by the spirit of the rule, and the piecemeal way it developed over time, which suggested the incremental way that common law evolved.

Supporting his argument with a raft of footnotes dropped in like legal punch lines, Mr. Stevens described the infield-fly rule as a technical remedy for sneaky behavior that would not have occurred in the days when baseball was a gentlemen’s sport played for exercise.

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Baseball, to keep alive the gentlemanly spirit underlying the game, drafted rules to enforce correct behavior. In civil society, the writ system evolved, giving plaintiffs a specific rule to appeal to when seeking redress. “Conduct was governed by general principles; but to enforce a rule of conduct, it was necessary to find a remedy in a specific writ,” Mr. Stevens wrote.

Like common law, the infield-fly rule developed bit by bit, with refinements added to address new problems as they arose, just as common law uses judicial decisions and legislation to make legal remedies conform to new situations.

Within a year of its publication, the infield fly article began being mentioned in judicial decisions. It generated imitations and commentaries with titles like “Further Aside: A Comment on ‘The Common Law Origins of the Infield Fly Rule,’ ” “The Infield Fly Rule and the Internal Revenue Code: An Even Further Aside,” and “Strict Constructionism and the Strike Zone and in re Brett : The Sticky Problem of Statutory Construction.”

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Mr. Stevens’s note has turned up in scholarly articles on subjects as diverse as bankruptcy, constitutional law and ethics.

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“Legal scholars simply cannot keep their hands off the infield fly rule — either substantively or as a metaphor,” Spencer Weber Waller and Neil B. Cohen wrote in “Taking Pop-ups Seriously: The Jurisprudence of the Infield Fly Rule,” a 2004 article in The Washington University Law Quarterly.

William Stanley Stevens was born in Orange, N.J., and grew up in Millburn and Short Hills. He earned a bachelor’s degree from Yale in 1970 and spent two years as an officer in the Navy. He received his law degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1975.

After graduating from law school he worked for several law firms in the Philadelphia area. In 1990, he became an assistant director of the American Law Institute and the American Bar Association’s continuing education program, which organizes seminars to keep lawyers up to date on changes in the law. He retired in September but took a one-year assignment as the acting director of the Alaska Bar Association’s continuing education program.

He is survived by his father, Harry J. Stevens of Summit, N.J.; his brother Jay, of San Francisco; and his sisters Joan Carroll Stevens of Ringoes, N.J., and Susan S. Sullivan of Brooklyn.

Mr. Stevens contributed many articles to The Philadelphia Lawyer, the magazine of the Philadelphia Bar Association, and was a member of its editorial board. None achieved the reputation of the infield fly note, which grew out of his passionate love for baseball and his abandoned plans to write a magisterial multivolume work with the title “Doubleday on Baseball.”

“It has given me far more than the 15 minutes of fame Andy Warhol said I should get,” he told Mr. Jarvis. “With recent flurries of interest in the piece, I am probably up to 21 minutes and 15 seconds.”

He added: “My ego is simultaneously flattered and bruised by the notion that something I cranked out more than 25 years ago would prove to be the highlight of my professional and academic careers.”