Commemoration of Brown Anniversary and Remarks by ABA President Archer Added to Opening Day of Annual Meeting; Comey Will Replace Haynes as Speaker at Wednesday Luncheon

There have been several late additions and changes to the schedule of the 81st Annual Meeting at The Mayflower in Washington on May 17-19. The program on the opening day of the Meeting will now include a 50th anniversary commemoration of the United States Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education, as well as remarks by Dennis W. Archer, the first person of color to serve as President of the American Bar Association. In addition, the General Counsel of the Defense Department, William J. Haynes II, previously announced as speaking at the luncheon on May 19, is now unable to do so and has been replaced by the Deputy Attorney General, James B. Comey. Previously announced as speakers at the 2004 Annual Meeting are Chief Justice of the United States William H. Rehnquist, United States Senator from Maryland Paul S. Sarbanes, and Judge Dolores Korman Sloviter of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit.

The 50th anniversary of Brown on May 17 coincides with the first day of the Annual Meeting, and the Institute’s special guests on this occasion will be Cecilia and John Marshall, widow and son respectively of the late Supreme Court Justice, Thurgood Marshall, who as counsel for the NAACP was the chief strategist for the plaintiffs in the case that struck down the prevailing doctrine of "separate but equal" and led to the end of legal segregation throughout the United States. John Marshall is presently Secretary of Public Safety for the state of Virginia. Participating in the Institute’s Brown commemoration, which will take place at approximately 12:10 p.m., will be former Secretary of Transportation William T. Coleman, Jr., and Judge Louis H. Pollak of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. Both now members of the ALI’s Council, Mr. Coleman and Judge Pollak were members of Justice Marshall’s successful team in litigating the Brown case half a century ago.

ABA President Dennis Archer is a graduate of Western Michigan University and of Detroit College of Law. After 15 years of private practice and teaching at both Detroit College of Law and Wayne State University Law School, he was appointed in 1985 as an Associate Justice of the Michigan Supreme Court and elected the following year to an eight-year term, at the conclusion of which he was named the most respected judge in Michigan by Michigan Lawyers Weekly. In 1994 he was elected to the first of two four-year terms as Mayor of Detroit.

A former President of the Wolverine Bar Association, the National Bar Association, and the State Bar of Michigan, Mr. Archer has also served as President of the National League of Cities and of the National Conference of Democratic Mayors. Presently Chair of Dickinson Wright PLLC, a Detroit-based firm, Mr. Archer has been named one of the 100 most powerful attorneys in the United States by the National Law Journal.

Mr. Archer has been an ALI member since 2002 and is presently Chair of the ALI-ABA Committee on Continuing Professional Education. He will speak on May 17 following the conclusion of Chief Justice Rehnquist’s remarks, which are scheduled to begin at 11:00 a.m.

Deputy Attorney General Comey will speak at the luncheon for members and guests on Wednesday, May 19. Born in Yonkers, New York, Mr. Comey is a graduate of the College of William & Mary and of the University of Chicago Law School. After graduating from law school, he served as a law clerk for Judge John M. Walker, Jr., of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York and then joined the New York City office of the law firm of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher. In 1987 he joined the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, where he remained until 1993, eventually becoming Deputy Chief of the Criminal Division. During this period he served as lead prosecutor in United States v. John Gambino et al., a six-month mafia racketeering and murder trial in 1993, and received the Henry L. Stimson Medal from the New York City Bar Association as the outstanding Assistant U.S. Attorney in the city.

In 1993 Mr. Comey began three years of private practice in Richmond for McGuireWoods, LLP, where he became a partner specializing in criminal defense and commercial litigation. He then served from 1996 through 2001 as Managing Assistant Attorney in charge of the Richmond Division of the United States Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia. In this capacity, he handled the Khobar Towers terrorist bombing case, arising out of the June 1996 attack on a U.S. military facility in Saudi Arabia in which 19 airmen were killed, and personally investigated and prosecuted a wide variety of cases, including firearms, narcotics, major frauds, violent crime, public corruption, terrorism, and organized crime. While in Richmond, he was also an Adjunct Professor of Law at the University of Richmond.

In 2002 Mr. Comey was appointed United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, where he was in charge of numerous terrorism cases and supervised the prosecutions of executives of WorldCom, Adelphia, and Imclone on fraud and securities-related charges. He also created a specialized unit devoted to prosecuting international drug cartels.

In October of 2003, President Bush nominated Mr. Comey to serve as Deputy Attorney General, and the Senate unanimously confirmed his nomination in December. His responsibilities in his current post include advising and assisting the Attorney General in formulating and implementing Departmental policies and programs and in providing overall supervision and direction to all organizational units of the Justice Department.

Chief Justice Rehnquist on May 17 will be addressing an ALI Annual Meeting for the ninth time, having previously done so in 1987, 1990, 1992, 1993, 1996, 1998, 2000, and 2001. A graduate of Stanford University and Stanford Law School and a former law clerk to Justice Robert H. Jackson of the United States Supreme Court, the Chief Justice practiced law in Phoenix from 1953 to 1969, when he became a United States Assistant Attorney General in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel. In 1973 he was appointed to the Supreme Court by President Nixon, and in 1986 he was chosen by President Reagan to succeed Warren E. Burger as Chief Justice. He is the author of The Supreme Court: How It Was, How It Is (1987; revised and expanded, 2001), Grand Inquests: The Historical Impeachments of Justice Samuel Chase and President Andrew Johnson (1992), All the Laws But One: Civil Liberties in Wartime (1998), and Centennial Crisis: The Disputed Election of 1876 (2004).

Paul S. Sarbanes, who will be the speaker at the Institute’s Annual Dinner on Tuesday evening, May 18, is Maryland’s senior Senator and a native of Salisbury, Maryland. He graduated in 1954 from Princeton University, in 1957 from Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar, and in 1960 from Harvard Law School. He then spent a year as law clerk to Judge Morris A. Soper of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit.

After six years in private practice in Baltimore, during which period he also served as Executive Director of the Baltimore Charter Revision Commission, Mr. Sarbanes was elected as a Democrat to the Maryland House of Delegates. In 1970 he was elected to the first of three terms to the United States House of Representatives. As a member of the House Judiciary Committee in 1974, he introduced the first Article of Impeachment, for obstruction of justice, against President Richard M. Nixon. In 1977 he was elected for the first time to the Senate, and after his reelection in 2000 to a fifth term, he became the longest-serving Senator in Maryland’s history.

In the Senate Mr. Sarbanes has served on the Banking, Joint Economic, Foreign Relations, and Budget Committees. He is Ranking Democrat on the Banking Committee, which he chaired from 2001 to 2003; he also chaired the Joint Economic Committee from 1991 to 1995. During his tenure as Chair of the Banking Committee, Senator Sarbanes responded to the 2001 collapse of the Enron Corporation by presiding over a series of hearings that led in 2002 to the enactment of "The Public Company Accounting Reform and Investor Protection Act," popularly known as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act after its two principal sponsors, Senator Sarbanes and Representative Michael Oxley, Chair of the House Financial Services Committee. The legislation, hailed by President Bush as embodying "the most far-reaching reforms of American business practices since the time of Franklin Delano Roosevelt," created an independent board to oversee the auditors of public companies while requiring corporate leaders to be personally liable for the accuracy of their company’s financial reports.

As a result of his leadership in bringing about the enactment of "Sarbanes-Oxley," Senator Sarbanes in 2003 received the Paul H. Douglas Ethics in Government Award from the University of Illinois. Another recent honor was the presentation to Senator Sarbanes of the 2002 John V. Kabler Memorial Award by the Maryland League of Conservation Voters for his contributions to the environment, including authorship of the Chesapeake Bay Restoration Act and the Chesapeake Bay Gateways and Watertrails Act.

Judge Sloviter, who will speak on Tuesday, May 18, at the luncheon honoring new life members, members elected 50 years ago, and members who were elected within the last five years, will represent the membership class of 1979, which attains life membership at the 2004 Annual Meeting. A native of Philadelphia, Judge Sloviter is a graduate of Temple University and the University of Pennsylvania Law School, where she was a Note Editor on the Law Review. Judge Sloviter joined the Philadelphia law firm of Dilworth, Paxson, Kalish & Green in 1956, becoming a partner in 1964, and in 1969 she joined the law firm of Harold E. Kohn. As a practitioner she concentrated on litigation, particularly in the field of antitrust. She left private practice in 1972 and joined the faculty of Temple University School of Law, where she taught both antitrust and civil procedure. In 1979 Judge Sloviter became the first woman to sit on the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit when she was appointed to that Court by President Jimmy Carter. She served as Chief Judge from 1991 to 1998. From 1990 to 1993 she was a member of the United States Judicial Conference’s Committee on the Rules of Practice and Procedure.

Judge Sloviter has been a member of the Institute since 1980 and was an Adviser to the ALI’s Federal Judicial Code Revision Project. Among the honors she has received are the Judicial Award of the Pennsylvania Bar Association, the James Wilson Award of the University of Pennsylvania, Temple University’s Certificate of Honor Award, and the Sandra Day O’Connor Award of the Philadelphia Bar Association. In 1990 she was a Distinguished Fulbright Scholar in Chile. She is a member of the Board of Directors of the National Constitution Center.

The Annual Meeting’s opening session at 10:00 a.m. on Monday, May 17, will also include reports by ALI Director Lance Liebman, ALI-ABA Executive Director Richard E. Carter, and Treasurer Bennett Boskey, as well as a presentation to Michael Marks Cohen of New York City of the ALI’s John Minor Wisdom Award for his outstanding contributions as a member to the Institute’s work. A casual lunch and colloquium will be held on Monday, May 17, for the particular benefit of new members. The Officers’ Reception and Buffet for members and guests will be held on Monday evening at the new City Museum of Washington, D.C.