The President’s Letter
A Few Words about Leadership of The American Law Institute
Because we meet just once a year as a body, and because even then not all our members are able to attend, I thought it might be good to close out this year with a few words about the ALI Council. Each and every one of them participates in ALI’s work in just the way you would rightly expect. Their careful and thoughtful review of our project drafts gives practical insight that allows the Restatements, Principles, model codes, and studies we produce to earn their justly deserved accolades.
That accomplishment would be extraordinary enough if they were just the busy lawyers, judges, and scholars that you know them to be. The fact that they are sought out as leaders by so many entities, in so many places, makes us especially appreciate their devotion to the work of the ALI. In just the last few months, several of our Council members have been entrusted with serious new responsibilities that I would like to highlight for you. In fact, I could go through the entire Council (and maybe sometime I will, in story and song—well, not so much the song part), praising their amazing records and current undertakings, but that would take more space than our quarterly newsletter allows. So I thought just highlighting a baker’s dozen of our Council members, in no particular order, would give you the flavor of our extraordinary Council.
Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, formerly on the Alameda County Superior Court bench in California, is now federal Judge Gonzalez Rogers, the most recent addition to the trial bench of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. She is the first Latina judge in that district. In her spare time she now chairs our Membership Committee.
Ken Frazier has been the CEO of Merck since January 2011, but he has just been asked by the Board of Trustees of Penn State University to chair the special committee that will investigate the terrible allegations of child abuse at that university. The board’s trust in his integrity, his swift thoughtful actions in moving quickly to start the investigation, and the concern conveyed in his statements are not surprising to anyone who knows Ken. In addition to his corporate duties and other civic responsibilities, Ken has been an active Council member and serves on the Nominating Committee, which, as you know, has been very active in the last few years because of our governance changes.
Marty Lipton is the chair of our Investment Committee. We read very often about his practice at Wachtell Lipton and the impact of his comments and ideas in the areas of corporate governance, as well as his work for the betterment of New York City. Marty is also the chair of the Board of Trustees of NYU.
In addition to carrying out her duties as our Treasurer, Judge Carolyn Dineen King is of course active on the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, but she also serves as Secretary of the Board of Baylor College of Medicine in Houston.
David Rivkin, a litigation partner at Debevoise & Plimpton LLP, has chaired our ad hoc committee on International Members. Under our current two-year experiment, he chairs a subcommittee that reviews nomination of members from outside the United States and forwards its advice on those nominations to our Membership Committee. He has major responsibility in the International Bar Association as its Secretary General.
Harvey Perlman is the Chancellor of the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. Somehow he still finds the time to read drafts from our Reporters and make terrifically helpful additions and edits across the full spectrum of our work. He recently chaired an NCAA task force that called for management and financial reforms for postseason Division I college football bowls and recommended new academic standards to determine teams’ eligibility for postseason play.
In her private practice at Skadden Arps, Sheila Birnbaum is justly known as one of the major forces in the defense bar. She is an active Council member who has given invaluable insights into our work in aggregate litigation and all manner of torts. Her reading of our other work as it comes to the Council is always practical and thoughtful. After completing her job as the court-appointed mediator in the cases of certain families who lost loved ones in the 9/11 attack, she was recently asked to serve as the special master to oversee the $2.8 billion fund that Congress has appropriated for the first responders and others who have illnesses resulting from exposure to toxic fumes, smoke, and dust after the attack.
Doug Laycock, the Robert E. Scott Distinguished Professor of Law, Horace W. Goldsmith Research Professor of Law, and Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia, argued a major freedom-of-religion case, Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and School v. EEOC, before the United States Supreme Court in October. He is one of less than a handful of major scholars in this area. His recently published book, Religious Liberty, Volume 2: The Free Exercise Clause, should be required reading, not only for those who work in this important area of the Bill of Rights, but for any American interested in better understanding the complex way these issues make their way from concern to court. Doug is a Vice President of the ALI and thus is deeply involved in all of our work, both administrative and intellectual.
Daniel Meltzer returned from the White House, where he was Principal Deputy Counsel to the President, to Harvard Law School and, happily for us, to our Council. He is on our Nominating and Executive Committees and serves on the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board. We can not imagine a more reasoned approach to important issues of national concern than Dan’s.
Judge Lee Rosenthal, a federal trial judge in Houston, recently completed her term as chair of the Committee on Rules of Practice and Procedure of the Judicial Conference of the United States, which allowed her to become the chair of our Program Committee, the key committee that reviews proposals for new projects and oversees the work of all of our projects.
Diane Wood, judge on the Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit and Senior Lecturer in Law at the University of Chicago Law School, serves as the chair of our Nominating Committee and has been named to the Commission on the Humanities and Social Sciences, which was formed by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences pursuant to a bipartisan request from Congress.
Elizabeth Cabraser somehow manages to have a major plaintiffs’ class-action practice based in San Francisco at Lieff Cabraser and to be an adjunct faculty member at Columbia Law School. Elizabeth recently was honored with the ABA’s Margaret Brent Award and joined many other Council members as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Among a host of major multidistrict litigation matters in which Liz serves as lead plaintiffs’ counsel is the BP Gulf Oil Spill case. We have imposed additional responsibility on Elizabeth by her appointment to our Ad Hoc Committee on Membership.
Gerhard Casper’s major responsibilities are emblematic of many of our emeritus Council members. Gerhard, who is President Emeritus at Stanford, currently serves on many boards and recently finished a term as a member of the Yale Corporation. He has just been named to a one-year term as the Director of Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and is deeply enmeshed in significant scholarly work and teaching at Stanford. Gerhard too will be on our Ad Hoc Committee on Membership.
My point is to note that our iconic founders and their successors in the last century would have complete confidence in the exemplary Council that now oversees our work. Because of our leaders and members, the ALI remains deeply important to the functioning of the American justice system and is admired around the world for its method, quality, and impact.
I wish you happiest year-end holidays, a healthy New Year, and, as always,
I wish you joy.
Roberta
Roberta Cooper Ramo
President