The American Law Institute will award its Early Career Scholars Medal to Professors Michelle Wilde Anderson of Stanford Law School and David Pozen of Columbia Law School. The award recognizes outstanding law professors whose work is relevant to public policy and has the potential to influence improvements in the law. The medalists are selected every other year and presented the award at the Institute’s Annual Meeting.
“I am pleased that we chose to award the Early Career Scholars Medal to these extraordinary professors,” said Justice Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar of the Supreme Court of California, who serves as the chair of ALI’s Early Career Medal Selection Committee. “Michelle and David have crafted remarkable pieces of legal scholarship as timely as they are learned, and as creative and thought-provoking as they are nuanced and precise. By underscoring the importance not only of intelligence but practicality, their work embodies the ideals of The American Law Institute. Michelle’s scholarship on regions facing economic dislocation and concentrated poverty has the potential to improve conditions in these communities, and David’s work on government accountability, transparency, and secrecy has proven widely influential at a time when these topics are especially salient.”
Professor Anderson is a Professor of Law and Robert E. Paradise Faculty Fellow for Excellence in Teaching and Research at Stanford Law School. She is a scholar of state and local government law, and regional governance. Her work combines legal analysis, empirical research, and a deep understanding of institutions and communities to shed light on phenomena such as geographically-concentrated poverty and municipal fiscal distress. Her recent publications explore, among other topics, restructuring (such as bankruptcy, disincorporation, and receiverships) in cities and counties facing chronic poverty related to deindustrialization. As Professor Andersen shows, these issues affect not only Rust Belt capitals such as Detroit, but also post-industrial cities in California, rural counties in the West and South, and small towns across the country. She is currently completing a book about what we need most from local governments in America’s high-poverty, post-industrial areas.
Prior to joining Stanford Law School in 2014, Professor Anderson was an assistant professor of law at the University of California Berkeley Law School. She has been a research fellow at the European Commission’s Urban Policy Unit in Brussels and an environmental law fellow at Shute, Mihaly & Weinberger. She clerked for Judge Guido Calabresi on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and Judge Marilyn Hall Patel on the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. Professor Anderson is the Chair of the Board of Directors of the National Housing Law Project and a Member of the Board of Directors of the East Bay Community Law Project in Oakland, California.
Professor Pozen is a Professor of Law at Columbia Law School. He teaches and writes about constitutional law and information law, among other topics. His scholarship on the political economy and sociology of government transparency has been featured in dozens of media stories and multiple international conferences and described as “changing the way we think about a subject that had grown stale.” Much of his constitutional scholarship identifies situations in which public law practices are not working as desired—situations of “bad faith,” “self-help,” “uncivil obedience,” “constitutional hardball,” methodological “impurification”—and tries to help legal actors understand them better and respond in more candid and constructive ways. He is currently working on an empirical analysis of constitutional polarization, a critique of information fiduciaries, and a historical study on the rise of the nonprofit sector and its implications for constitutional law.
For the 2017-2018 academic year, Professor Pozen was the inaugural visiting scholar at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. From 2010 to 2012, he served as special advisor to Harold Hongju Koh at the Department of State. Previously, he was a law clerk for Justice John Paul Stevens on the U.S. Supreme Court and for Judge Merrick B. Garland on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, and a special assistant to Senator Edward M. Kennedy on the Senate Judiciary Committee.
In addition to Justice Cuéllar, the members of the Early Career Scholars Medal Committee are ALI President David F. Levi of Duke University School of Law; ALI President Emeritus and Chair of the Council Roberta Cooper Ramo of Modrall Sperling; Katharine T. Bartlett of Duke University School of Law; Curtis A. Bradley of Duke University School of Law; Rochelle C. Dreyfuss of New York University School of Law; Christine M. Durham of Utah Supreme Court (retired); Allison Eid of the U.S. Court of Appeals, Tenth Circuit; Paul Engelmayer of the U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York; Howell E. Jackson of Harvard Law School; Miguel Márquez of the County of Santa Clara; Eric A. Posner of University of Chicago Law School; Patti B. Saris of the U.S. District Court, District of Massachusetts; Randall T. Shepard of Indiana Court of Appeals; and Stuart H. Singer of Boies, Schiller & Flexner.