FACULTY FOCUS
Inaugurating the An-Bryce and Opperman Professorships
Professor Deborah Malamud
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he Law School proudly inaugurated two new chairs this year: the An-Bryce and the Dwight D. Opperman professorships. An-Bryce Professor of Law Deborah Malamud, who teaches labor and employment law, gave the An-Bryce talk, introduced by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. The first Dwight D. Opperman Professor of Law, Samuel Estreicher, director of the Center for Labor and Employment Law and codirector of the Institute of Judicial Administration, delivered the Opperman speech, with an introduction by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy. “Professor Malamud brings honesty, depth of scholarship, a passion for helping others and an interest in people trying to do their best,” said Justice Thomas at the An-Bryce lecture in September 2004. The AnBryce program, founded by self-made millionaire philanthropist Anthony Welters ’77 and his wife Beatrice, offers fellowships and mentoring to underprivileged scholars with leadership potential who are among the first in their families to attend graduate school. Professor Malamud’s speech covered her own story of upward mobility as well as her evolving research agenda. She grew up in a lower-middle-class neighborhood, and eventually clerked for Judge Louis Pollak, U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania and Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun. She was quick to note, however, that her life’s journey “was a very, very small one…hardly a trip at all compared to the trips the An-Bryce Scholars, the Welterses and Justice Thomas have taken.” Her professional interests have been influ-
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THE LAW SCHOOL
Professor Samuel Estreicher
enced by her personal experience, she said. While her early work focused on the potential for class-based affirmative action to succeed, her recent research is about the ways government shapes our understanding of what it means to be middle class. On April 4, Justice Kennedy introduced the Dwight D. Opperman lecture. He praised Opperman, a nationally recognized philanthropist and chairman of Key Investments, a privately held high-tech venture capital firm, for his commitment to the judiciary and to legal education. “The federal judges,” Kennedy told the audience, “have no truer friend than Dwight Opperman.” Estreicher’s lecture explored the unmet legal needs of modestly paid workers. In “Beyond Cadillacs and Rickshaws: Towards a Culture of Citizen Service,” he said that the U.S. civil court system is like a Cadillac: It provides superior service, including extensive discovery and generous damage awards, but only to those who can afford to bring lawsuits. Those who can’t would be lucky to have a rickshaw. People of modest means with grievances have become “orphans of the law.” According to Estreicher, “No one will come to their aid.” He added that the high costs of litigation make it impossible for workers in the lower–middle class to even contemplate bringing a lawsuit. Estreicher proposed that law schools institute more clinical programs to handle claims of working-class people. He also urged law firms to take on more consumer-oriented matters as pro bono cases, arguing that providing legal services to the working class is “more likely to result in substantial improvements,” than pro bono class-action lawsuits. ■
Daniel Hulsebosch Wins Surrency Prize
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he American Society for Legal History awarded a 2004 Surrency Prize to Professor of Law Daniel Hulsebosch for his Law and History Review article, “The Ancient Constitution and the Expanding Empire: Sir Edward Coke’s British Jurisprudence.” A prolific legal historian, Hulsebosch explores ways in which legal culture integrates societies across space and time. In his prizewinning piece, Hulsebosch waded through reams of Coke’s arcane early modern English prose and Medieval Latin to analyze his constitutional jurisprudence. He clarifies Coke’s views of the rights and liberties of the King’s subjects in Britain and in the overseas empire, and contrasts Coke’s actual views with those cleverly appropriated years later by rebellious American colonists. “Coke often appears as either a crabbed, distant figure in English legal history or a heroic prophet of judicial review. I don’t think either picture is accurate,” says Hulsebosch, who considers Coke the dominant legal thinker of the age of imperial expansion. Hulsebosch, who is publishing his first book this fall, Constituting Empire: New York and the Transformation of Constitutionalism in the Atlantic World, 1664–1830 (University of North Carolina Press) sees his work as a painstaking attempt to “understand the legal history of the British Empire as a whole.” And how does he feel about winning the coveted Surrency Prize? “It’s nice to get some positive reinforcement for one’s obsessions,” he says modestly. —Ranjani Ramaswamy