George W. Wickersham
George Woodward Wickersham was unanimously elected President of ALI at the first Council meeting on February 24, 1923, and served as President until his death in 1936. From the beginning, he held a firm belief in the social usefulness of the Institute’s work.
In the first 13 years of the Institute’s organization, there were 13 Annual Meetings, 48 Council meetings, and 69 Executive Committee meetings. Wickersham was present at and presided over all of these meetings except those held in the spring of 1925, when he was in Europe serving as the sole representative of the United States on a committee of the Council of the League of Nations for the simplification and improvement of International Law, and in 1934 when he was confined to his house by illness for several months.