Linda Klein is the senior managing shareholder at Baker Donelson Bearman Caldwell & Berkowitz and president of the American Bar Association. 

Ms. Klein’s practice, based in Atlanta, includes most types of business dispute resolution, including contract law, employment law and professional liability, working extensively with clients in the construction, higher education and pharmaceutical industries.

In June 1997, she became the first woman to serve as president of the State Bar of Georgia. During her term, she devised a proposal and advocated for the state to allocate funding for Georgia Legal Services and Atlanta Legal Aid to hire lawyers to help indigent victims of domestic violence. She organized a statewide group of community organizations and local and minority bar associations that together convinced the General Assembly to appropriate $2 million. Since then, the annual appropriations have helped thousands in Georgia with legal issues related to domestic violence.

Ms. Klein was one of the first women to lead a prominent Georgia law firm. She served as managing partner of Gambrell & Stolz beginning in 2001 and led the firm's 2007 merger with Baker Donelson, becoming a Baker Donelson board member and Georgia managing shareholder.

She served as chair of the ABA's House of Delegates, the second highest office in the organization, from 2010−2012. She has also served as chair of the Tort Trial and Insurance Practice Section, chair of the Committee on Rules and Calendar of the House of Delegates, chair of the Coalition for Justice, and chair of ABA Day, the Association's Congressional outreach effort. She is a member of the Council of the ABA Section of International Law and also serves as a columnist and on the Board of Editors of Law Practice Management Magazine. In 2004, the American Bar Association honored her with the prestigious Margaret Brent Women Lawyers of Achievement Award.

She was an early member of the Board of Directors Network, a nonprofit organization whose mission is to increase diversity on corporate boards and general counsel positions. Her other community activities include leadership in Southface Energy Institute and the Buckhead Coalition. In June, Ms. Klein received the Distinguished Service Award, the highest honor bestowed by the State Bar of Georgia.  In 2009, she was honored with the Randolph Thrower Award for Lifetime Achievement from the State Bar of Georgia and was named to the YWCA Academy of Women Achievers.

A member of the American Law Institute, Ms. Klein is listed in The Best Lawyers in America, Who's Who in America, and Chambers USA. She is regularly named to the Super Lawyers top 100 lawyers in Georgia, an honor bestowed upon only nine women in 2014. She is also regularly named one of the top 50 female lawyers in Georgia by Super Lawyers. In 1998, Georgia Trend Magazine named her one of the 100 most powerful and influential Georgians.

Ms. Klein earned her J.D. at Washington & Lee Law School in Virginia and her B.A. at Union College in New York.

David W. Rivkin is a partner in the New York and London offices of Debevoise & Plimpton and Co-Chair of the firm’s International Dispute Resolution Group. He practices primarily in the areas of international litigation and arbitration. He is The Immediate Past President of the International Bar Association (IBA), and was the first American to serve as President of the IBA in 25 years.

Subjects of arbitrations handled by Mr. Rivkin include long-term energy concessions, investment treaties, joint venture agreements, insurance coverage, construction contracts, distribution agreements, and insurance coverage. Mr. Rivkin also represents companies in transnational litigation in the United States, including the enforcement of arbitral awards and arbitration agreements.

Mr. Rivkin was elected to ALI in 1997 and to ALI Council in 2009. He chairs ALI’s advisory group on international members and serves as one of eight Counselors for the Restatement of the Law Fourth, The Foreign Relations Law of the United States. He is also an Adviser for the Restatement of the Law, The U.S. Law of International Commercial Arbitration project. Previously, he was an Adviser for the Transnational Rules of Civil Procedure project. He received his undergraduate and law degrees from Yale.

The Rev. Dr. Wesley S. Williams, Jr., has had a lengthy and esteemed legal career as both a practicing attorney and a law professor since completing his J.D. from Harvard Law School in 1967.  He has also earned a B.A., magna cum laude, M.A., an LL.M., and a D.Min. degree.

He started as an instructor at Columbia University Law School, while commuting for a year and a half to work for the Washington Office of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and as counsel to the then newly-formed District of Columbia City Council. He spent a year and a half as legal counsel to the U.S. Senate Committee on the District of Columbia.

In the fall of 1970, Dr. Williams commenced his nearly 35 years with Covington & Burling. Concurrently, he served as an adjunct professor at Georgetown University Law Center. He also served as a member of the Executive Committee of the Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.

Dr. Williams is the recipient honoris causa of the LL.D. degree from his parents’ alma mater, Virginia Union University, “for pioneering achievements in law, business, education, religion and community service.” Also, by command of the Sovereign Prior, Her Royal Britannic Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, he was dubbed a Knight of Grace (honorary) of the Most Venerable Order of the Hospital of St. John of Jerusalem “for sustained commitment to the ideals of the Order, in service to humankind.”

After his retirement from law practice in 2004, he prepared for and was subsequently ordained to priesthood in The Episcopal Church. In this capacity, he now serves as the Bishop of the Virgin Islands’ Sub-Dean for the islands of St. Thomas and St. John, as Priest-in-Charge of the Cathedral Church of All Saints and All Saints Cathedral School, and as Vicar of Nazareth By The Sea Episcopal Church – the Cathedral, its school, and Nazareth Church all located on St. Thomas. He is the President and Co-Chairman of Lockhart Companies Incorporated. 

Mr. Harper is a retired partner at Simpson Thacher & Bartlett. He received his bachelor’s degree from Howard University in 1962 before graduating from Harvard Law School in 1965. Mr. Harper spent the first five years of his career as a staff lawyer for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund in New York. He joined Simpson Thacher in 1971, and became its first African American partner in 1974. In 1993, Mr. Harper was appointed Legal Adviser for the U.S. Department of State. From 1993 to 1996 and from 1998 to 2004, he also served as U.S. representative to the Permanent Court of Arbitration at The Hague. In 1996, he returned to Simpson Thacher, and became of counsel to the firm in 2003.

In 1990, Mr. Harper was elected the first African American president of the New York City Bar Association, where he worked to increase diversity within the Association’s committees and governance.

Mr. Harper was the first African American appointed to the Harvard Corporation, Harvard University’s highest governing body, serving from 2000 to 2005. He has served as an officer or on the board of numerous organizations, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the William Nelson Cromwell Foundation, and the American Philosophical Society. He is a former Chancellor of the Episcopal Diocese of New York and a member of the Modern Language Association, the Jane Austen Society of North America, the Johnsonians, the Johnson Society of London, and the Henry James Society.

A member of ALI since 1977, Mr. Harper attended his 35th Annual Meeting this year. Elected to the Institute’s Council in 1985, he served as Second Vice President from 1998 to 2000 and as First Vice President from 2000 to 2004, taking Council Emeritus status in 2011. Mr. Harper was a member of ALI’s Executive Committee from 1987 to 2005; he has also served on the Nominating Committee, the Committee on Institute Program, the Awards Committee, the Special Committee on the ALI Young Scholars Medal, the Special Committee on Strategic Communication, and the Ad Hoc Committee on Membership Process. He chaired the Style Manual Committee that oversaw publication of the Institute’s first style manual for project Reporters in 2005, and he also served on the committee tasked with revising the manual in 2015. He was an Adviser for the ALI’s Principles of Transnational Rules of Civil Procedure and its project on Recognition and Enforcement of Foreign Judgments and a Counselor on the Restatement Fourth, The Foreign Relations Law of the United States.

D. Brock Hornby has been a Judge of the U.S. District Court for the District of Maine since 1990, and served as Chief Judge from 1996 to 2003. He formerly was a Justice of the Maine Supreme Judicial Court and a U.S. Magistrate for the U.S. District Court for the District of Maine. Before joining the bench, he was a partner at the firm of Perkins, Thompson, Hinckley & Keddy in Portland, Maine, and a professor at the University of Virginia School of Law.

Judge Hornby was elected to ALI in December 1979 and was elected to the Council in May 1996. He serves as Chair of the Awards Committee, and was previously an Adviser on the Restatement Third, Agency project and the Restatement Third, Restitution and Unjust Enrichment project.

He received his undergraduate degree from the University of Western Ontario and his law degree from Harvard. After law school, he clerked for Judge John Minor Wisdom of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg will receive the Henry J. Friendly Medal at the Institute’s 95th Annual Meeting. Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., will present the award. 

Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Associate Justice, was born in Brooklyn, New York, March 15, 1933. She married Martin D. Ginsburg in 1954, and has a daughter, Jane, and a son, James. She received her B.A. from Cornell University, attended Harvard Law School, and received her LL.B. from Columbia Law School. She served as a law clerk to the Honorable Edmund L. Palmieri, Judge of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, from 1959 to 1961. From 1961 to 1963, she was a research associate and then associate director of the Columbia Law School Project on International Procedure. She was a Professor of Law at Rutgers University School of Law from 1963 to 1972, and Columbia Law School from 1972 to 1980, and a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in Stanford, California from 1977 to 1978. In 1971, she co-founded the Women’s Rights Project of the American Civil Liberties Union, and served as the ACLU’s General Counsel from 1973 to 1980, and on the National Board of Directors from 1974 to 1980. She served on the Board and Executive Committee of the American Bar Foundation from 1979 to 1989, on the Board of Editors of the American Bar Association Journal from 1972 to 1978, and on the Council of The American Law Institute from 1978 to 1993. She was appointed a Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in 1980. President Clinton nominated her as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, and she took her seat August 10, 1993. 

ALI President Roberta Cooper Ramo is a shareholder in the law firm of Modrall Sperling, where she concentrates her practice in the areas of mediation, arbitration, business law, real estate, probate, and estate planning.  She has been a member of the Institute since 1991 and was elected to the Council in 1997. She has served as ALI’s President since 2008 and she previously served as First Vice President from 2004 to 2008.

On August 1, 2015, Roberta received the American Bar Association's highest award, the ABA Medal.  Roberta previously served as president of the American Bar Association from 1995 to 1996, the first woman in history to lead the largest nationwide organization of attorneys.  She also serves as the first woman president of The American Law Institute, elected in 2008.  In 2011, she was elected into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, adding her name to a prestigious list of members including George Washington and Albert Einstein, among other notables.

A Fellow of both the American College of Trust and Estate Counsel and the American Bar Foundation, Roberta also has served as a panel member for the American Arbitration Association. In 2013, Roberta was elected Board Chair of Think New Mexico, a non-partisan think tank, and she serves as a member of the Board of the Santa Fe Opera and Albuquerque Economic Development.

Roberta was appointed by the United States Senate and served as co-chair of a committee to review governance issues of the U. S. Olympic Committee in 2003. She was named an honorary member of the Bar of England and Wales, and of Gray's Inn in 2000. She served on the Board of Regents for the University of New Mexico from 1989 to 1995, and as President of the Board from 1991 to 1993. She also served on the New Mexico Board of Finance. President Ramo will be concluding her final term as ALI President at the end of this year’s Annual Meeting.

Justice Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar began serving on the Supreme Court of California in January 2015. He was nominated by Governor Jerry Brown, confirmed unanimously by the Commission on Judicial Appointments, and retained by the voters for a full term in November 2014. His previous career was in public service, university administration, and legal academia, with a focus on administrative, criminal, and international law.

A full-time member of the Stanford University faculty from 2001 to 2015, Justice Cuéllar was the Stanley Morrison Professor of Law and Professor (by courtesy) of Political Science. His books, articles, and chapters focus on administrative agencies, criminal justice, executive power, and legislation, among other subjects, and he is co-author of one of the nation’s leading administrative law casebooks. From 2004 to 2015, he held leadership positions at Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. As Institute Director, he supervised 12 research centers and programs, including the Stanford Center at Peking University. He led university-wide initiatives on global poverty alleviation and cybersecurity, and earlier, co-directed the Institute’s Center for International Security and Cooperation.

Justice Cuéllar also served in the federal executive branch. In 2009 and 2010, while on leave from Stanford, he worked at the White House as Special Assistant to the President for Justice and Regulatory Policy. He negotiated provisions in food safety, tobacco, and crack-powder cocaine sentencing reform legislation; convened the White House’s food safety working group and coordinated its response to the BP oil spill; set up the President’s Equal Pay Task Force; worked on the bipartisan repeal of the military’s Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell policy; and led efforts to support community-based crime prevention and immigrant integration. He was a presidential appointee, between 2010 and 2015, to the governing council of the U.S. Administrative Conference, an agency designed to improve fairness and efficiency in federal administrative procedures. He co-chaired the U.S. Department of Education’s National Equity and Excellence Commission from 2011 to 2013.  Before that, in 2008 and early 2009, he co-chaired the presidential transition team on immigration, borders, and refugees.

Justice Cuéllar is on the boards of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, The American Law Institute, and the American Bar Foundation, and is a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Within the California Judiciary, he leads the Language Access Implementation Task Force. He was the Barbara Herrell Bond Distinguished Lecturer at Oxford University in 2012, and earlier was a member of the Silicon Valley Blue Ribbon Task Force on Aviation Security and Technology.

Justice Cuéllar serves as an Adviser for the ALI projects on Principles of Law: Policing, and Sexual and Gender-Based Misconduct on Campus: Procedural Frameworks and Analysis; and on the Members Consultative Groups for the Restatement Fourth, The Foreign Relations Law of the United States, Principles of Government Ethics, and Model Penal Code: Sentencing.

A naturalized U.S. citizen born in northern Mexico, he graduated from Calexico High School in California’s Imperial Valley.  He received a B.A. from Harvard, magna cum laude, a J.D. from Yale Law School, and a Ph.D. in Political Science from Stanford. After law school, he began his career at the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Enforcement working on disrupting financial and cross-border crime, and clerked for Chief Judge Mary M. Schroeder of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. He is married to Judge Lucy H. Koh of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. They have two children.

Thomas C. Goldstein is an appellate advocate, best known as one of the nation’s most experienced Supreme Court practitioners. He has served as counsel to one of the parties in roughly 10 percent of all of the Court’s merits cases for the past 15 years (more than 100 in total), personally arguing 38. Only three lawyers in the Court's modern history have argued more cases in private practice. He has been counsel on more successful petitions for certiorari over the past decade than any other lawyer in private practice. Over the past 15 years, the firm's petitions for certiorari have been granted at a higher rate than any private law firm or legal clinic.

Perhaps more than any other advocate in practice, Mr. Goldstein represents the complete spectrum of litigants before the Court; his work is not associated with any particular perspective or ideology.  For example, as arguing counsel, Mr. Goldstein has prevailed on behalf of bond purchasers, corporate civil defendants (three times), corporate civil plaintiffs (three times), a debtor, employees (twice), a habeas petitioner (three times), an immigrant, investors, an individual civil defendant, an individual criminal defendant, a local government, persons with disabilities, and shareholders.

Mr. Goldstein’s representations span virtually all of federal law. For example, as arguing counsel in the Court, he has prevailed in cases involving arbitration, bankruptcy, civil procedure (twice), disability law, employment discrimination (twice), the Fourth Amendment (twice), free speech (three times), habeas corpus (three times), immigration, labor, securities (twice), and trademarks.

Mr. Goldstein also serves as counsel in particularly significant cases in the courts of appeals. For example, he presently serves as lead counsel for most of the nation's principal retailers in a Second Circuit appeal of the second-largest class action settlement in history. Mr. Goldstein also represents a number of different corporations in patent-related matters in the Federal Circuit.

In addition to practicing law, Mr. Goldstein has taught Supreme Court Litigation at Harvard Law School since 2004, and previously taught the same subject at Stanford Law School for nearly a decade. Mr. Goldstein is also the co-founder and publisher of SCOTUSblog – a web-site devoted to comprehensive coverage of the Court – which is the only weblog ever to receive the Peabody Award.

Mr. Goldstein has received a variety of recognitions for his practice before the Supreme Court and for his appellate advocacy generally. For example, in 2010, the National Law Journal named him one of the nation’s 40 most influential lawyers of the decade. The same publication included him in both of its most recent lists (2006 and 2013) of the nation’s 100 most influential attorneys. Legal Times named him one of the “90 Greatest Washington Lawyers of the Last 30 Years.” GQ named him (erroneously) one of the 50 most powerful people in Washington, D.C.

Mr. Goldstein is involved in a variety of professional organizations. Among other things, he is a member of ALI, Secretary of the ABA Labor and Employment Section, Vice Chair of the Amicus Committee of the ABA Intellectual Property Section, and an elected Fellow of the Academy of Appellate Lawyers.

Mr. Goldstein previously practiced at Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld, where for a time he served as the principal co-chair of the firmwide litigation practice. Early in his career he was an associate at both Boies Schiller and Jones Day Reavis & Pogue. He clerked for Judge Patricia Wald of the D.C. Circuit.