Harper Succeeds Traynor as First Vice President; Acting to fill a vacancy created by the death last summer of President Charles Alan Wright and the elevation of First Vice President Michael Traynor to the presidency, the Council at its meeting on October 18 elected Second Vice President Conrad K. Harper to succeed Mr. Traynor and Elizabeth Warren, the Leo E. Gottlieb Professor of Law at Harvard University, to be the new Second Vice President. Both will complete the terms of their predecessors, which will conclude at the end of the 2001 Annual Meeting. An authority on bankruptcy and commercial law, Professor Warren is a member of the Executive Board of the National Bankruptcy Conference and is presently serving as Reporter for the National Bankruptcy Review Commission. She joined the Harvard faculty in 1995, where she was given the Sacks and Freund Award for Teaching Excellence. Before moving to Harvard, she taught at the University of Pennsylvania, where she received the University’s Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching and held the William A. Schnader Chair in Commercial Law, named for a former ALI Vice President. A graduate of the University of Houston and of the Rutgers University School of Law in Newark, Professor Warren has also taught at Rutgers, Houston, and the University of Texas. She is co-author of As We Forgive Our Debtors: Bankruptcy and Consumer Law in America (1989), which won the ABA’s Silver Gavel Award and was a finalist for the award of the American Sociological Association as best book of the year. She is also co-author of The Fragile Middle Class (2000), as well as of The Law of Debtors and Creditors (1986, 4th ed. 2000) and Secured Credit: A Systems Approach (1995, 3d ed. 2000), and the author of Business Bankruptcy (1994). Professor Warren was elected to the Institute in 1986 and joined the Council in 1993. She has served on both the ALI’s Executive and Nominating Committees and as an Adviser for its Transnational Insolvency Project. A partner in the New York City law firm of Simpson Thacher & Bartlett and former Legal Adviser of the United States Department of State, Mr. Harper became the first African American to serve as an officer of the Institute when he was elected Second Vice President in 1998. Mr. Harper, who concentrates his practice in litigation and international arbitration, received his undergraduate degree from Howard University and his law degree from Harvard Law School. He was on the staff of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund from 1965 to 1970 and joined Simpson Thacher & Bartlett in 1971. He has been a partner with that firm since 1974 except for the period (1993-1996) when he served as State Department Legal Adviser. Formerly President (1990-1992) of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York, Mr. Harper is a member of the Board of Directors of the American Arbitration Association. He was Co-Chair of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law from 1987 to 1989 and chaired the Committee on Admissions and Grievances of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit from 1987 to 1993. A Fellow of the American College of Trial Lawyers, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Bar Foundation, and the New York State Bar Foundation, Mr. Harper has also been a lecturer at Yale Law School. From 1987 to 1992 he was Chancellor of the Episcopal Diocese of New York. He is a member of the Harvard Corporation, the senior governing body of Harvard University. A member of the Institute since 1977 and of the Council since 1985, Mr. Harper has served as an Adviser to the ALI’s Restatements of The Law Governing Lawyers and Torts: Products Liability, and he is currently an Adviser to its projects on Transnational Civil Procedure and International Jurisdiction and Judgments. He presently serves on the Executive and Nominating Committees and chairs the Committee on Institute Style. At the same meeting, Harvey S. Perlman, formerly Dean of the University of Nebraska College of Law and now Interim Chancellor of the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, was elected to an interim term on the Council. Dean Perlman had previously served from 1995 to 1999 but resigned last year to become Co-Reporter for the Institute’s Restatement Third of Torts: General Principles. When his new administrative position made it too difficult for him to continue as Reporter, he was asked to rejoin the Council. His name will be submitted to the Annual Meeting in May for election to a regular term. |