Charles Alan Wright
1927-2000

Charles Alan Wright, the seventh President of The American Law Institute, died in an Austin, Texas, hospital on July 7 of complications from pulmonary surgery. He was 72. Author and coauthor of major treatises on the federal courts and on federal practice and procedure, President Wright was for 45 years a member of the faculty of the University of Texas Law School. At the time of his death he held the Charles Alan Wright Chair in Federal Courts at Texas, which had been specially created in his honor.

The first ALI president to die in office since the death of the Institute’s first President, George W. Wickersham, in 1936, President Wright had last year announced his intention to step down at the close of the 2001 Annual Meeting, and the Council in December named First Vice President Michael Traynor of San Francisco President Designate. Shortly after the death of President Wright, the Council elected Mr. Traynor the Institute’s eighth President, effective immediately.

President Wright presided in May over what turned out to be his final ALI Annual Meeting, and on June 10 he participated in the Philadelphia meeting of the Advisers for the Institute’s Federal Judicial Code Revision Project. Back in Austin on June 13 he attended a luncheon at the Supreme Court of Texas celebrating the election of two Justices of that court to the Institute and the fact that all nine members of the court are now ALI members. The next day he entered the hospital for surgery. He hoped to recover sufficiently to attend the July 17 ALI reception in London that he had been instrumental in organizing, but the event instead provided the occasion for a moving memorial tribute at which President Traynor presided. President Wright had recently stated that "the principal theme" of his presidency was "the need for strengthening the international aspects of our work" and noted the significant increase in the Institute’s foreign membership since he took office in 1993. In London United States Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was fittingly joined by four eminent English members of the Institute — Lord Woolf of Barnes, now Lord Chief Justice; Lord Lester of Herne Hill; Sir David Williams; and Professor Gareth Jones — in reflecting on President Wright’s character and achievements.

Born in Philadelphia on September 3, 1927, President Wright was a graduate of Wesleyan University and of Yale Law School. He taught at the University of Minnesota Law School from 1950 to 1955, when he joined the law faculty at Texas. He was a Visiting Professor at Harvard, Yale, and the University of Pennsylvania Law Schools, as well as a Visiting Fellow and subsequently an Honorary Fellow of Wolfson College in Cambridge, England, and the Arthur Goodhart Visiting Professor in Legal Science at the University of Cambridge. In addition to publishing prolifically in the fields of civil and criminal procedure, evidence, and constitutional law, he argued numerous cases in the United States Supreme Court as well as in federal courts of appeals and in state supreme courts. He was a member of the Standing Committee on Rules of Practice and Procedure of the Judicial Conference of the United States from 1964 to 1976 and 1987 to 1993. From 1978 to 1983 he chaired the Committee on Infractions of the National Collegiate Athletic Association, and in 1993-1994 he was Chairman of the Review Panel of the NCAA.

President Wright was a Reporter for the Institute’s Study of the Division of Jurisdiction Between State and Federal Courts from 1963 until its completion in 1969 and more recently served as an Adviser to Restatement Second, Judgments; Restatement Second, Restitution; and Restatement Third, Unfair Competition. A member of the Council since 1969, he was elected Second Vice President of the Institute in 1987, and First Vice President in 1988. In 1993 he became the first law professor to serve as the Institute’s President. At the time of his death he was Vice Chair of the ALI-ABA Committee on Continuing Professional Education and Chair of its Executive Committee. A devotee of detective fiction, he frequently reviewed crime novels that dealt with lawyers and the law in the ALI-ABA periodical, The Practical Lawyer.

President Wright’s numerous honors included the Student Bar Association Teaching Excellence Award, the Fellows Research Award of the Fellows of the American Bar Foundation, the Robert B. McKay Law Professor Award of the American Bar Association’s Section of Tort and Insurance Practice, the Fordham-Stein Prize of the Stein Center for Law and Ethics at Fordham University, and the Federal Bar Council’s Learned Hand Medal for Excellence in Federal Jurisprudence. In 1999 he was elected a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy.