The Distinguished Service Award was presented to Steven O. Weise of Proskauer Rose on Tuesday, May 16. This award is given from time to time to a member who over many years has played a major role in the Institute as an institution, by accepting significant burdens as an officer, Council member, committee chair, or project participant and by helping keep the Institute on a steady course.
Weise helps keep the Institute on a steady course by wearing many hats. Elected to the ALI in 1992 and to the Council in 2012, he currently serves as chair of the Investment Committee, previously having served as chair of the ALI CLE Program and Marketing Committee. His dedication to helping the Institute provide continuing legal education for lawyers has continued after his duties as chair concluded. In fact, Weise was one of our panelists at this year’s Annual Meeting CLE Sunday program on Emerging Technologies.
As ALI co-chair for Principles for a Data Economy, completed in 2021, Weise helped to coordinate the work of this joint venture with the European Law Institute, the first transatlantic collaboration of its kind. With his wide range of UCC expertise, he has served as an ALI designee on the Permanent Editorial Board for the Uniform Commercial Code since the mid-1990s. He also serves as an Adviser for the Restatement of the Law, Consumer Contracts, and Restatement of the Law Fourth, Property, projects.
While Weise has contributed deeply to projects connected to his professional experience, his enthusiasm and talent in taking information from one area of law and applying it to another is demonstrated in his widespread participation in the Members Consultative Groups of countless projects, including several Restatement Third of Torts projects: Concluding Provisions, Remedies, Intentional Torts, Liability for Economic Harm, and Liability for Physical and Emotional Harm. The work produced by the Institute would not be as high of a caliber without the generalist’s perspective.
Outside of his time at ALI, Weise is a partner at Proskauer’s Corporate Department and practices in all areas of commercial law. His experience in financing is extensive, especially in those secured by personal property, including structured financing. He also handles matters involving California real property anti-deficiency laws, workouts, guarantees, sales of goods, equipment leasing, commercial paper and checks, letters of credit, and investment securities. Weise’s experience covers e-commerce, contract law (including “plain English” drafting), legal opinions, and consumer credit law compliance matters. He lectures widely on commercial-law topics and legal-opinion letters, and is the author of more than 100 articles on these topics.
Weise earned his B.A. from Yale University and his J.D. from University of California, Berkeley School of Law.