Recently, Simpson Thacher & Bartlett launched the Conrad Harper 2L Diversity Fellowship in honor of retired partner Conrad K. Harper. The fellowship seeks to increase the firm’s diverse summer associates and promote the advancement and retention of associates from groups that are historically underrepresented in the legal profession.
Harper received his bachelor’s degree from Howard University in 1962 before graduating from Harvard Law School in 1965. He 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 & Bartlett in 1971 and became its first African American partner in 1974. In 1993, he 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 & Bartlett, and became of counsel to the firm in 2003.
In 1990, 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.
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, Harper was 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. 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. In 2017, Harper received ALI’s Henry J. Friendly Medal.
The Simpson Thacher & Bartlett fellowship was named in honor of Harper’s work and contributions to the legal field. Learn more about it on Simpson Thacher & Bartlett’s website.