Bill Petrocelli is the co-owner with his wife, Elaine, of the nationally renowned bookstore Book Passage with stores in California in Corte Madera, Sausalito, and at the Ferry Building in San Francisco. Bill attended Oakland Public Schools and is a graduate of the University of California at Berkeley and the U.C. Law School. In addition to several years in private practice, he served as a California Deputy Attorney General and as the head of a poverty law office in Oakland, California. He served on the Board of the American Booksellers Association and as attorney for the Northern California Independent Booksellers Association, in which he successfully pursued a major price-discrimination suit against publishers. Recently, he was the plaintiff in a First Amendment case challenging a California law that threatened to interfere with the distribution of autographed books.