In what may have been his last public appearance, the late Charles Alan Wright on June 13 visited the Supreme Court of Texas to celebrate the fact that all nine Justices are now ALI members.

Seated, l. to r.: Justice Nathan L. Hecht, Chief Justice Thomas R. Phillips, President Charles Alan Wright, Justice Craig T. Enoch, Justice Priscilla R. Owen, Justice Greg Abbott.

Standing: Justice Harriet O’Neill, Justice James A. Baker, Justice Deborah G. Hankinson, Justice Alberto R. Gonzales.

The President’s Letter

It was, in my biased judgment, an unusually good Annual Meeting in every respect except one. I was disappointed by the attendance and will say more about that later but intellectually the meeting was a great success. We completed work on two important projects on which we had been engaged for years: Principles of the Law of Family Dissolution and the Transnational Insolvency Project. In both of those fields we have broken new ground and I think that our work will have great influence. We had lively discussions of International Jurisdiction and Judgments and of proposed Articles 1 and 2 of the Uniform Commercial Code. The relations between the leadership of the National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws and the leadership of ALI are cordial, but what the final answer will be on Article 2 of UCC remains to be seen. We were honored to have the Chief Justice of the United States address us on our opening day and the Master of the Rolls of the Royal Courts of Justice, Lord Woolf (now the Lord Chief Justice) spoke splendidly at the Annual Dinner.

Two Restatement projects made their first appearance at an Annual Meeting, a Discussion Draft of Restatement Third of Restitution and Unjust Enrichment and Tentative Draft No. 1 of Restatement Third of Agency. As I said in a letter I sent to all of you with your dues statement, those Restatement topics may not sound like the most inspiring, but those of you who were in the room and heard the superb Reporters we had on each of those projects know we are in for years of interesting work. Andrew Kull, of Emory, for Restitution and Deborah DeMott, of Duke, for Agency both did a splendid job and left us looking forward eagerly to next year.

Illustration 4 to § 2.03 in the Agency Restatement (the section on Apparent Authority) led to an unusual discussion. For those of you who do not have T.D. 1 of Agency close at hand I repeat the Illustration:

P owns a large collection of paintings. T, the director of a museum, asks P to donate a painting to the museum. P responds to T, "I have hired A, a professional art historian, to manage my collection, to decide which paintings, if any, should be donated to museums, and to make the donations. Talk to A." Without informing T, P directs A to make no gifts of paintings without P’s specific approval. After a conversation with T, A gives T a painting from P’s collection for the museum. When P learns that A has made the gift, P promptly demands that the museum return the painting. The painting belongs to the museum. Although A lacked actual authority to make the gift, A had apparent authority to do so based on P’s explicit representation to T. A’s delivery of the painting completed the gift. The museum’s right to retain the painting does not depend on its ability to show that it has relied on receipt of the gift.

Professor Kull, the Restitution Reporter, was in the room, and I recognized him. He said that he did not agree with the result stated in Illustration 4. In his view, the museum would be under a duty to make restitution of the painting. Professor DeMott defended her position, and the two professors had a lively discussion of the sort for which The Institute is famous: contrary positions are asserted by two experts with great courtesy and goodwill. Finally Lance Liebman, our Director, said that he was sure that Professors Kull and DeMott could get together and work this out. I then added that the one way in which I do not want to see it worked out is for the Illustration to appear in both Restatements, with Agency saying that the painting belongs to the museum and Restitution saying that the museum is under a duty to make restitution. Come early to get a seat next year to see how this is resolved.

Now for a word about attendance. The number of people who appeared in Washington and registered as attending the Annual Meeting was 776. The average number of registrants for the preceding 15 Annual Meetings (1985-1999) has been 987, and that includes four years when we met away from Washington, where the attendance is always lower. For Washington meetings the average number of registrants in those years was 1059 and the lowest number was 950 in 1997. ALI, unlike almost every other organization I know about, charges nothing to attend the Annual Meeting. Therefore the low number of registrations costs The Institute nothing, but it still bothers me.

I receive regular reports on the number of reservations ALI members have made at The Mayflower and The Madison. For the two weeks before the Annual Meeting I was dismayed to see those numbers going down, as members who had booked reservations decided that they would not attend. And I worried even more at the message I received from the Chief Justice of one of our finest state courts. I had written him, inviting him and his wife to a small party I was giving during the days of the Annual Meeting. His answer was that they had decided not to come because, though he hated to admit it, there was really nothing on the program that interested him.

I recognized that we had no blockbuster subjects this year such as Products Liability, Law Governing Lawyers, or Corporate Governance. And I know I should have done a better job in telling you what was coming up. I had heard Andrew Kull and Deborah DeMott making presentations to Council and I knew that anyone who heard them would go away feeling that the time had been splendidly spent. Similarly our excellent Reporters gave vivid life to our first international project, Transnational Insolvency, and made a project that would have seemed of numbing dullness lively and practical. I knew that not many of our members practice Family Law, but all of us have a keen interest in it as citizens.

One senior member of Council has written me saying that when he reviewed the agenda, the subjects did not seem to have the appeal that he thought would make him attend if it took a lot of time and effort. However, the program and items themselves discussed at the meeting made it a very exciting and informative meeting. I am sure that if the members knew how exciting the meetings were going to be, attendance would have been higher. It is my fault that you did not know. The Program for an Annual Meeting always reads like a prospectus subject to review by the SEC. It tells you all that you need to know about what is going to happen, but it does so in a staid, stiff-collared way that does not convey how exciting the things are going to be. I would not change the Program for an instant. I like the fact that The Institute moves conservatively on its inner affairs at least, and thinks that the best reason for doing something one way is that this is the way that it was done in 1923. But in this column I have no such restraint. I should have used the column to spell out for you better what you would miss if you did not attend the Annual Meeting.

There is a brighter side. Ever since 1994 we have had a member of the staff go through the room every couple of hours and make a count of the number of persons actually in the room at that time. Those numbers this year, as they always are, were highest for the address from the Chief Justice. But throughout the week we had a representative number of people in the Grand Ballroom whenever we were in session. That is where our work is done, and I should be satisfied that we had a good number of interested members present at all times to debate and to listen and to vote on what was being presented to us.

ALI members are all busy men and women. We would not elect you to membership unless you have a long record of creative and useful activity. We cannot expect you to take time away from your practice or your court or your bluebooks to come to Washington if we do not give you an accurate picture of why it will be useful, important, and pleasant for you to do so. I have loved every part of every Annual Meeting I have attended (and I have been a member for 42 years). Some parts of course are better than others, but to me it is fascinating to learn about areas of the law on which I am woefully uninformed, if not invincibly ignorant, and to learn new things even on such subjects as the Federal Judicial Code Project, where I like to think that I am not uninformed. The staff and the Institute’s officers work hard to get excellent Reporters and to plan an Annual Meeting that intellectually and socially you will think of as one of the high spots of the year. I think we lived up to that this year, but we are going to have to do a better job of making clear to all of you what is in store.

Charles Alan Wright