Boss and Astigarraga Elected to Council

The Council has elected to its ranks Amelia H. Boss, the Charles Klein Professor of Law at Temple University, and José I. Astigarraga of the Florida bar. They will serve on an interim basis until the 2001 Annual Meeting in May, when their names will be submitted to the membership with the recommendation that they be elected to regular terms.

A member of the Permanent Editorial Board for the Uniform Commercial Code and its Executive Subcommittee since 1992, Professor Boss, 51, was named as one of the top 50 women lawyers in the United States by the National Law Journal in 1998 and is presently serving as Chair of the American Bar Association’s Business Law Section. She is the author of Electronic Data Interchange Agreements: A Guide and Sourcebook (1993), The ABCs of the UCC: Leasing (1996), and The ABCs of the UCC: Letters of Credit (1998). She also served as Editor-in-Chief of The Data Law Report from 1993 to 1997 and of The Business Lawyer from 1998 to 1999, and has contributed many articles to professional journals. Professor Boss is a fellow of the American Bar Foundation and a member of the International Bar Association, the American Bankruptcy Institute, the American College of Commercial Financial Lawyers (Board of Regents), and the National Association of Women Lawyers. Elected to the Institute in 1980, she has served as an ALI Representative on the Drafting Committees for Revised Articles 1 (1996- ) and 2 (1991-1999), as well as for [New] Revised Articles 2 and 2A (1999- ), of the Uniform Commercial Code.

Born in Baltimore, Professor Boss graduated from Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania in 1970 and received her law degree in 1975 from Rutgers University School of Law in Camden, New Jersey, where she was a member of the Rutgers Law Journal. Upon graduation, she served for a year as a law clerk to the late Judge Milton B. Conford of the New Jersey Superior Court and then spent two years in private practice with the Philadelphia law firm of Pepper, Hamilton & Scheetz. In 1978 she joined the law faculty of Rutgers, Camden, and became an Associate Professor in 1983. In 1989, following another stint in private practice with the New Jersey law firm of McCarter & English, she joined the faculty of Temple University. She became a full Professor at Temple in 1992 and was named to the Klein Chair in 1999. She teaches courses at Temple in commercial law, electronic commerce, and international business transactions. In the spring of 1998 she was the Leo Goodwin Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Shepard Broad Law Center of Nova Southeastern University.

Internationally, Professor Boss has worked with organizations such as the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law (to which she served as United States representative) and the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development. She was the author of the report that led to Temple’s establishment of the first full semester-abroad program for United States law students in Tokyo and became the first Temple Professor to teach in the program. She was instrumental as well in establishing in Beijing both the Temple University LLM Program and the Business Law Center, which offers continuing legal education and technical assistance to the Chinese. She has also taught courses in Ireland, Austria, Greece, and Italy.

A native of Havana, Mr. Astigarraga, 47, came to the United States in 1960 at the age of seven. He received his undergraduate degree in 1975 from the University of Miami and his law degree in 1978 from the University of Miami School of Law, where he was named a Harvey T. Reid Scholar. While a student he served initially as Chief Bailiff for the Dade County Juvenile and Family Court and subsequently as Law Clerk-Bailiff for the 11th Judicial Circuit Court of Florida. After Law School he joined the Miami firm of Steel Hector & Davis, where he became a partner in 1984 and eventually head of the firm’s international litigation and creditors’ rights groups. He left Steel Hector last year to become a founding partner of Astigarraga Davis Mullins & Grossman, PA, in Miami.

Mr. Astigarraga served from 1994 to 1997 as a United States representative on the NAFTA Commission’s Advisory Committee on the Resolution of Private International Commercial Disputes, and he was named by the State Department a Designated Expert to represent the United States at the negotiations leading to the Sixth Conference of the Organization of American States on Private International Law (CIDIP-VI). As consultant to the World Bank, he co-authored its recent publication, An Assessment of Latin American Insolvency Systems. He is a member of the American Arbitration Association’s Panels for International and Commercial Financial Disputes and of the Panel of Arbitrators of the Commercial Arbitration and Mediation Center of the Americas (CAMCA), as well as a co-founder of the London Court of International Arbitration’s Latin American Users’ Council. He presently serves on the board of directors of the National Law Center for Inter-American Free Trade and on the International Arbitration, Litigation, and Insolvency Committees of the International Bar Association and Uniform Commercial Code and Business Bankruptcy Committees of the American Bar Association. Since 1989 he has been a trustee of the Florida International University Foundation and has served on its Executive Committee and as Chair of its Nominating Committee.

Elected to the Institute in 1995, Mr. Astigarraga was an Adviser to the ALI’s recently completed Transnational Insolvency Project.