A prolific trial attorney with a highly successful 30-plus-year career, Greenberg Traurig Co-President Hilarie Bass is one of the most prominent women attorneys in the United States. She is currently President of the American Bar Association, the world’s largest voluntary professional organization with more than 400,000 members, for a one-year term, effective August 2017. As President, she has focused on reforming legal education, advancing and retaining women in the law, establishing a legal fact-check program, and addressing the legal needs of homeless youth. She was elected to the ALI in 2016.

Hilarie has successfully represented high-profile corporate clients in jury and non-jury trials involving hundreds of millions of dollars in controversy. She has worked on and settled more than 100 cases, tried more than 20 cases to conclusion, and argued numerous appeals. In recognition of that success, she was inducted into The American College of Trial Lawyers. Hilarie is also widely recognized for her pro bono work, including her work on behalf of two foster children that led to the elimination and declaration as unconstitutional Florida’s 20-year-old ban on gay adoption.

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. 

John G. Roberts, Jr., Chief Justice of the United States, was born in Buffalo, New York, January 27, 1955.  He married Jane Sullivan in 1996 and they have two children - Josephine and Jack.  He received an A.B. from Harvard College in 1976 and a J.D. from Harvard Law School in 1979.  He served as a law clerk for Judge Henry J. Friendly of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit from 1979–1980, and as a law clerk for then-Associate Justice William H. Rehnquist of the Supreme Court of the United States during the 1980 Term.  He served as a Special Assistant to the Attorney General of the United States from 1981–1982, Associate Counsel to President Ronald Reagan, White House Counsel’s Office from 1982–1986, and as Principal Deputy Solicitor General from 1989–1993.  From 1986–1989 and 1993–2003, he practiced law in Washington, D.C.  He served as a Judge on the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit from 2003-2005.  Nominated as Chief Justice of the United States by President George W. Bush, he assumed that office on September 29, 2005.

Colleen Chien is an Associate Professor at Santa Clara University School of Law where she teaches, writes, and mentors students. From 2013 to 2015 she served in the Obama White House as a Senior Advisor, Intellectual Property and Innovation, working on a broad range of patent, copyright, technology transfer, open innovation, educational innovation, and other issues. Professor Chien is nationally known for her research and publications on domestic and international patent law and policy issues. She has testified on multiple occasions before Congress, the DOJ, the FTC, and the US Patent and Trademark Office on patent issues, frequently lectures at national law conferences, and has published several in-depth empirical studies, including ones on patent litigation, patent-assertion entities (PAEs) (a term that she coined), and the secondary market for patents. Prior to joining the Santa Clara University School of Law faculty in 2007, Professor Chien prosecuted patents at Fenwick & West LLP in San Francisco, as an associate and then Special Counsel, and was a Fellow at the Stanford Center for Law and the Biosciences. In 2017, Professor Chien was awarded The American Law Institute’s Early Career Scholars Medal, awarded every two years to up to two law outstanding professors; she also has received the Vanguard Award for Public Service, and has been named Eric Yamamoto Emerging Scholar, a Tech Law Leader, one of Silicon Valley’s “Women of Influence,” and one of the 50 Most Influential People in Intellectual Property in the world. Professor Chien is a graduate of Stanford (Engineering) and Berkeley Law Schools and lives in Oakland with her husband and their two sons, Max and Benjie. She is the founder of civic engagement projects Wall of Us and ActLocal and an advisor to ClearAccessIP, an AI-driven patent analytics and enterprise software firm and CitizenBe, which works to create and sustain impactful political participation.

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.