The Council has selected William T. Coleman, Jr., to become the fourth recipient of the ALI’s Henry J. Friendly Medal. Mr. Coleman was a main architect of the legal strategy leading to Brown v. Board of Education and the desegregation of schools and other public facilities throughout the United States, and he has played a leading role for nearly half a century in the effort to give reality to the principle of equality under law. A vigorous advocate as well for the essential value of the rule of law in a thriving democratic society in which private ownership of property is a vital factor, he will receive the Medal for his outstanding contributions to the law in the tradition of the late Judge Friendly and the Institute. It will be presented on May 15 at the opening session of the Institute’s 77th Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C.

Established in memory of Judge Friendly and endowed by his former law clerks, the Friendly Medal is not awarded on an annual basis but reserved for recipients who are considered especially worthy of receiving it. Its previous recipients were the late ALI Director Herbert Wechsler in 1993, the late Professor Paul A. Freund of Harvard Law School (one of Mr. Coleman’s teachers) in 1989, and the late Judge Edward Weinfeld of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York in 1987.

An adviser to six Presidents, Mr. Coleman served as Secretary of Transportation during the Ford Administration. He is presently a senior partner and the Senior Counselor of the law firm of O’Melveny & Myers, residing in its Washington, D.C., office. Born in Philadelphia in 1920, he received his undergraduate degree, summa cum laude, from the University of Pennsylvania and his law degree, magna cum laude, from Harvard University, where he was an Editor of the Law Review. After service as a law clerk for Judge Herbert Goodrich of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, who was the ALI’s second Director, and for Justice Felix Frankfurter of the Supreme Court of the United States, Mr. Coleman practiced law in New York and Philadelphia until his Cabinet appointment in 1975. Previously he had served as a member of the President’s Committee on Government Employment Policy from 1959 to 1961, as Assistant Counsel to the President’s Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy in 1964, and as both Legal Adviser for the Council on Environmental Quality and member of the President’s National Commission on Productivity in 1970. He joined O’Melveny & Myers in 1977.

As a member of Thurgood Marshall’s legal team at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Mr. Coleman was instrumental in the effort to desegregate the schools that culminated in the Brown decision in 1954. He subsequently represented the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania in the lengthy but successful effort to remove racial restrictions at Girard College in Philadelphia that eventually was upheld by the Supreme Court of the United States, and by Supreme Court appointment he successfully argued the case that upheld the denial of tax-exempt status to Bob Jones University. A Fellow of the American College of Trial Lawyers, he has argued numerous other cases before the Supreme Court involving banking, natural gas, nuclear energy, and other business and regulatory issues.

In 1971 Mr. Coleman became President of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund and later served as its Chair. In 1997 he received the Fund’s Thurgood Marshall Lifetime Achievement Award. Mr. Coleman was also awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1995 in recognition of his many years of public service, and in 1979 the President of France made him an officer of the National Order of the Legion of Honor. He has been a member of the Institute since 1963 and of the Council since 1969. Two of his three children, Lovida H. Coleman, Jr., and William T. Coleman III, are also lawyers and ALImembers, and the third, Hardin L. Coleman, is a Professor of Psychology at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. His wife is the former Lovida Hardin of New Orleans.

Judge Friendly, who died in 1986 at the age of 82, served on the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit from 1959 until his death. He was a member of the Council for a quarter of a century and an Adviser to the ALI’s Study of the Division of Jurisdiction Between State and Federal Courts, Model Code of Pre-Arraignment Procedure, Federal Securities Code, and Principles of Corporate Governance.