Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg will receive the Henry J. Friendly Medal at the Institute’s 95th Annual Meeting. Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., will present the award. 

Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Associate Justice, was born in Brooklyn, New York, March 15, 1933. She married Martin D. Ginsburg in 1954, and has a daughter, Jane, and a son, James. She received her B.A. from Cornell University, attended Harvard Law School, and received her LL.B. from Columbia Law School. She served as a law clerk to the Honorable Edmund L. Palmieri, Judge of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, from 1959 to 1961. From 1961 to 1963, she was a research associate and then associate director of the Columbia Law School Project on International Procedure. She was a Professor of Law at Rutgers University School of Law from 1963 to 1972, and Columbia Law School from 1972 to 1980, and a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in Stanford, California from 1977 to 1978. In 1971, she co-founded the Women’s Rights Project of the American Civil Liberties Union, and served as the ACLU’s General Counsel from 1973 to 1980, and on the National Board of Directors from 1974 to 1980. She served on the Board and Executive Committee of the American Bar Foundation from 1979 to 1989, on the Board of Editors of the American Bar Association Journal from 1972 to 1978, and on the Council of The American Law Institute from 1978 to 1993. She was appointed a Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in 1980. President Clinton nominated her as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, and she took her seat August 10, 1993. 

Elena Kagan, Associate Justice, was born in New York, New York, on April 28, 1960. She received an A.B. from Princeton in 1981, an M. Phil. from Oxford in 1983, and a J.D. from Harvard Law School in 1986. She clerked for Judge Abner Mikva of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit from 1986 to 1987 and for Justice Thurgood Marshall of the U.S. Supreme Court during the 1987 Term. After briefly practicing law at a Washington, DC law firm, she became a law professor, first at the University of Chicago Law School and later at Harvard Law School. She also served for four years in the Clinton Administration, as Associate Counsel to the President and then as Deputy Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy. Between 2003 and 2009, she served as the Dean of Harvard Law School. In 2009, President Obama nominated her as the Solicitor General of the United States. A year later, the President nominated her as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court on May 10, 2010. She took her seat on August 7, 2010.

A prolific trial attorney with a highly successful 30-plus-year career, Greenberg Traurig Co-President Hilarie Bass is one of the most prominent women attorneys in the United States. She is currently President of the American Bar Association, the world’s largest voluntary professional organization with more than 400,000 members, for a one-year term, effective August 2017. As President, she has focused on reforming legal education, advancing and retaining women in the law, establishing a legal fact-check program, and addressing the legal needs of homeless youth. She was elected to the ALI in 2016.

Hilarie has successfully represented high-profile corporate clients in jury and non-jury trials involving hundreds of millions of dollars in controversy. She has worked on and settled more than 100 cases, tried more than 20 cases to conclusion, and argued numerous appeals. In recognition of that success, she was inducted into The American College of Trial Lawyers. Hilarie is also widely recognized for her pro bono work, including her work on behalf of two foster children that led to the elimination and declaration as unconstitutional Florida’s 20-year-old ban on gay adoption.

Under Elizabeth J. Cabraser’s leadership, Lieff Cabraser has become one of the country’s largest law firms serving clients seeking redress for financial and consumer fraud, anti-competitive practices, harmful drugs and products, and illegal employment practices. She has served as court-appointed lead, co-lead, or class counsel in scores of federal multi-district and state coordinated proceedings, including serving as Lead Counsel and Chair of the Plaintiffs’ Steering Committee in the historic nationwide Volkswagen “Clean Diesel” Emissions fraud litigation and the recently filed Fiat Chrysler Ecodiesel Emissions fraud litigation.

Elected to the ALI in 1993 and to its Council in 1999, Ms. Cabraser serves on the Council’s Executive Committee and has served on several other Council Committees, is an Adviser for Restatement Third, Conflict of Laws, Restatement of the Law, Consumer Contracts, and Restatement Third, Torts: Liability for Economic Harm, and previously was an Adviser on the Recognition and Enforcement of Foreign Judgments project and the Principles of the Law of Aggregate Litigation project.  Since 2011, she has been a member of the Federal Civil Rules Advisory Committee.

Ms. Cabraser has written and spoken extensively on substantive legal issues as well as those related to the advancement of women in the profession. She lectures on class action and complex litigation at Berkeley and Columbia Law Schools, and has also lectured and conducted seminars for the Federal Judicial Center, ALI-ABA (now known as ALI CLE), the National Center for State Courts, Vanderbilt University Law School, and the Practising Law Institute. She has been named repeatedly to the Lawdragon 500, The Top 100 California Lawyers, and as a Super Lawyer in multiple fields. In 2010, the American Bar Association Commission on Women in the Profession honored Elizabeth with its Margaret Brent Women Lawyers of Achievement Award, regarded by many as the highest honor in the legal profession for women lawyers. She was selected by Law360 as a 2016 MVP for Class Action Law, was named 2017’s “Plaintiff Attorney of the Year” by Benchmark Litigation, and in November 2017 received the National Law Journal’s “Lifetime Achievement” award. She is also a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Colleen Chien is an Associate Professor at Santa Clara University School of Law where she teaches, writes, and mentors students. From 2013 to 2015 she served in the Obama White House as a Senior Advisor, Intellectual Property and Innovation, working on a broad range of patent, copyright, technology transfer, open innovation, educational innovation, and other issues. Professor Chien is nationally known for her research and publications on domestic and international patent law and policy issues. She has testified on multiple occasions before Congress, the DOJ, the FTC, and the US Patent and Trademark Office on patent issues, frequently lectures at national law conferences, and has published several in-depth empirical studies, including ones on patent litigation, patent-assertion entities (PAEs) (a term that she coined), and the secondary market for patents. Prior to joining the Santa Clara University School of Law faculty in 2007, Professor Chien prosecuted patents at Fenwick & West LLP in San Francisco, as an associate and then Special Counsel, and was a Fellow at the Stanford Center for Law and the Biosciences. In 2017, Professor Chien was awarded The American Law Institute’s Early Career Scholars Medal, awarded every two years to up to two law outstanding professors; she also has received the Vanguard Award for Public Service, and has been named Eric Yamamoto Emerging Scholar, a Tech Law Leader, one of Silicon Valley’s “Women of Influence,” and one of the 50 Most Influential People in Intellectual Property in the world. Professor Chien is a graduate of Stanford (Engineering) and Berkeley Law Schools and lives in Oakland with her husband and their two sons, Max and Benjie. She is the founder of civic engagement projects Wall of Us and ActLocal and an advisor to ClearAccessIP, an AI-driven patent analytics and enterprise software firm and CitizenBe, which works to create and sustain impactful political participation.

Paul D. Clement is a partner in the Washington, DC, office of Kirkland & Ellis LLP.  He served as the 43rd Solicitor General of the United States from June 2005 until June 2008. Before his confirmation, he served as Acting Solicitor General for nearly a year and as Principal Deputy Solicitor General for more than three years.

Mr. Clement has argued more than 90 cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, including McConnell v. FEC, Tennessee v. Lane, Rumsfeld v. Padilla, Credit Suisse v. Billing, United States v. Booker, MGM v. Grokster, ABC v. Aereo, and Hobby Lobby v. Burwell. He has argued more Supreme Court cases since 2000 than any lawyer in or out of government. He has also argued many important cases in the lower courts, including Walker v. Cheney, United States v. Moussaoui, and NFL v. Brady.

Following law school, he clerked for Judge Laurence H. Silberman of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit and for Associate Justice Antonin Scalia of the U.S. Supreme Court. After his clerkships, he went on to serve as Chief Counsel of the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on the Constitution, Federalism, and Property Rights.

Mr. Clement is a Distinguished Lecturer in Law at the Georgetown University Law Center, where he has taught in various capacities since 1998, and a Distinguished Lecturer in Government at Georgetown University. He also serves as a Senior Fellow of the Law Center’s Supreme Court Institute. He previously served as an Adviser for the ALI’s recently adopted Principles of the Law, Election Administration: Non-Precinct Voting and Resolution of Ballot-Counting Disputes.

David M. Rubenstein is a Co-Founder and Co-CEO of The Carlyle Group, one of the world’s largest private equity firms. Mr. Rubenstein co-founded the firm in 1987. Since then, Carlyle has grown into a firm managing $174 billion from 31 offices around the world.

Mr. Rubenstein, a native of Baltimore, is a 1970 magna cum laude graduate of Duke, where he was elected Phi Beta Kappa. Following Duke, Mr. Rubenstein graduated in 1973 from the University of Chicago Law School, where he was an editor of The Law Review.

From 1973 to 1975, Mr. Rubenstein practiced law in New York with Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison. From 1975 to 1976, he served as Chief Counsel to the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Constitutional Amendments. From 1977 to 1981, during the Carter Administration, Mr. Rubenstein was Deputy Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy. After his White House service and before co-founding Carlyle, Mr. Rubenstein practiced law in Washington with Shaw, Pittman, Potts & Trowbridge (now Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman).

Bryan Stevenson is the founder and Executive Director of the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama. Mr. Stevenson is a widely acclaimed public-interest lawyer who has dedicated his career to helping the poor, the incarcerated, and the condemned. Under his leadership, EJI has won major legal challenges eliminating excessive and unfair sentencing, exonerating innocent death-row prisoners, confronting abuse of the incarcerated and the mentally ill, and aiding children prosecuted as adults. Mr. Stevenson has successfully argued several cases in the U.S. Supreme Court and recently won a historic ruling in the Court banning mandatory life-without-parole sentences for all children 17 or younger.

Mr. Stevenson has also initiated major new anti-poverty and anti-discrimination efforts challenging the legacy of racial inequality in America. His work fighting poverty and challenging racial discrimination in the criminal-justice system has won him numerous awards including the ABA Wisdom Award for Public Service, the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship Award Prize, the Olaf Palme International Prize, the ACLU National Medal of Liberty, the National Public Interest Lawyer of the Year Award, the Gruber Prize for International Justice, and the Ford Foundation Visionaries Award. In 2015, he was named to the Time 100 recognizing the world’s most influential people. In 2016, he received the American Bar Association’s Thurgood Marshall Award. He was named in Fortune’s 2016 and 2017 World’s Greatest Leaders list.

He is a graduate of the Harvard Law School and the Harvard School of Government, has been awarded 29 honorary doctoral degrees and is also a Professor of Law at the New York University School of Law. He is the recent author of the critically acclaimed New York Times bestseller, JustMercy, which was named by Time magazine as one of the 10 best books of nonfiction for 2014 and has been awarded several honors including the Carnegie Medal by the American Library Association for the best nonfiction book of 2014 and a 2015 NAACP Image Award. He was elected to the ALI in 2016.