The academic grilling—skewering,some might say—that marks the Law School’s Colloquium in Legal, Political and Social Philosophy has unnerved many an accomplished scholar. Yet when Samuel Scheffler opened his presentation last fall, he took the opportunity to take a playful jab at his colleagues instead.

Scheffler told the gathering he was glad Jeremy Waldron had joined professors Ronald Dworkin and Thomas Nagel in running the colloquium “because,” he said in his trademark deadpan style, “it wasn’t much of a challenge with just the two of them.”

Although Scheffler does not hold a law degree, his area of expertise—moral and political philosophy—overlaps with studies in jurisprudence, the theory and philosophy of law. When he arrives at NYU in 2008-09, he will divide his time between the philosophy department and the Law School, as he’s done at Berkeley since 1997. (He taught exclusively in Berkeley’s philosophy department from 1977 to 1997). There, he teaches the Workshop in Law, Philosophy and Political Theory, which he freely acknowledges as “a shameless ripoff of the colloquium.”

Reserved and unassuming, Scheffler, 55, is known not only for his wry wit—making him Berkeley’s most sought-after roast master—but for his lucid mind and relevant work. “He contributes to any discussion with a very pure and targeted statement,” says Nagel, who was Scheffler’s Ph.D. adviser at Princeton University 30 years ago.

Eric Rakowski, who coteaches the Berkeley workshop, adds that when Scheffler presents a summary of the presenter’s work, the visiting professors routinely ask him for a copy, noting, “It’s so beautiful, and it typically improves on the argument of the paper itself.”

Nagel calls Scheffler “one of the leading moral philosophers now writing. His work is about real, moral problems, not just abstract questions.” Adds onetime Berkeley professor Robert Post, now at Yale Law School, “Many philosophers write what they can get right. Sam writes about what matters.”

An ongoing theme of Scheffler’s current papers and his three books, The Rejection of Consequentialism (1982), Human Morality (1992) and Boundaries and Allegiances (2001), is the tension between ideas of universal justice and cosmopolitanism—the idea that all of humanity belongs to a single moral community—on the one hand, and a person’s particular loyalties and affiliations, such as family, nation and religion, on the other.

“I’ve spent a good deal of time investigating the reasons and responsibilities that arise from our development of personal projects and our participation in interpersonal relationships,” he says. “I have tried to explain the sources of these reasons and responsibilities, and to consider the extent to which they take priority over other proposed duties, such as the duty to promote the general welfare or to maximize the overall good.” In “Morality and Reasonable Partiality,” a paper he delivered at NYU in March, Scheffler argues that “up to a point, but only up to a point, we are not merely permitted but obligated to give the needs and interests of our intimates and associates priority over the needs and interests of others.”

Scheffler practices what he preaches. Berkeley colleague Sandy Kadish, a founder of that law school’s Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program (JSP), where Scheffler teaches his workshop, says he’s “a devoted citizen of the university community. He’s not the kind of fellow who says, ‘No, I’m too busy.’” Plus, “He doesn’t speak a lot at meetings, but when he does, people listen carefully.”

Scheffler has served as chair of Berkeley’s Department of Philosophy; has headed up the department’s personnel, admissions and placement committees; was active in the Law School Dean Search Committee; and served as an acting vice provost. While a faculty in residence at NYU last spring, Scheffler organized both the law and philosophy faculties to raise the profile of their course offerings and research opportunities.

He was brought up in the Boston area by his mother, Rosalind, a clinical psychologist, and father, Israel, a philosophy professor at Harvard University. A rebellious product of the 1960s, he received his first philosophical education as a teen arguing with his father. “My basic view was that whatever he said must be wrong,” Scheffler recalls. When Israel opposed the Vietnam War, Samuel took the opposite position—at least until the antiwar fervor swept him up. “Then I argued that my dad wasn’t far enough left,” he says. Through such father-son volleys, Scheffler says, “I was getting some sense of how you construct an argument and what resources there are for developing a position.”

Scheffler, who first got interested in politics and journalism in high school, entered Harvard to study political science. Much to his surprise, he found himself drifting toward philosophy, “where people were grappling with the most fundamental questions.” Upon completing his doctorate in philosophy, Scheffler landed a teaching job in Berkeley’s philosophy department, then joined the JSP program as well. He met his wife, Kathryn, when she worked at the university, and the two wed in 1983. They have two grown sons, Adam and Gabriel.

As for his move East, he says, “Berkeley is a wonderful place. I’ve loved being there.” But, he continues, “the central figures [in law and philosophy] are at NYU,” singling out professors Dworkin, Nagel, Waldron and Liam Murphy. “It’s a really extraordinary collection of people. Given the opportunity to join this group of people, anybody with my interests would have to have a very good reason not to do it.”

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During his 36 years at Harvard Law School, Professor Arthur Miller’s intimidating teaching style made him the stuff of legend. Students caught unprepared risked being ejected from class. Or, worse still, Miller would storm out himself. The story has it that, after seeing Miller deliver a blistering dressing-down to one student, Scott Turow based hard-as-nails law professor Rudolph Perini on him in One L.

“I demanded absolute preparation and I got it,” says Miller, who also commands respect with his signature three-piece suits worn with a red tie and pocket square. “Call it a dictatorship if you will, but my belief is that you never say ‘I’m unprepared’ to a judge or a senior partner.”

NYU Law students entering Miller’s first-year Procedure class (he will also teach Complex Litigation this spring) should expect to be put on the spot. “It’s a procedure course,” he says. “It isn’t a pablum course.” But, the 73-year-old admits, “I’ve mellowed.” In the five years he’s been a visiting professor here, he hasn’t stomped out of a single classroom. He even allows students to submit a note if extenuating circumstances prevent them from studying.

Miller, an expert in civil procedure, copyright law, privacy rights and complex litigation, keeps a toehold in practice, arguing in the appellate courts as well as the Supreme Court. He has also been a ubiquitous legal commentator on television. Among practitioners and judges, however, he is best-known for his multivolume Federal Practice and Procedure, which he coauthored with Charles Alan Wright.

“He is not only a superb legal scholar, a mesmerizing legal educator, and a great lawyer, he is also among that handful of people who can explore legal topics in a public forum in a manner that is vivid and captivating, respectful of the law, and respectful of the audience,” says NYU President John Sexton, who helped recruit Miller as a “University Professor,” which allows Miller to teach both in and outside the Law School. He is developing a seminar called Dialogues on Law, Society and the Future for the NYU School of Continuing and Professional Studies.

Miller was brought up an only child in a lower-middle-class Brooklyn neighborhood by his father, Murray, a struggling solo practitioner, and mother, Mary, a legal secretary. Discouraged from following in his dad’s footsteps, he entered the University of Rochester to study metallurgical engineering. That lasted eight days. “I fell asleep in calculus and fell off my chair. I was so embarrassed, I walked out of the room and changed my major.” An aptitude test steered him toward law, so after graduating a year early, Miller entered Harvard.

Given his tough-guy reputation, it’s ironic that Miller was himself a timid, insecure law student. “I used to hide so the professors wouldn’t call on me,” he says. Six percent—11 students—in his section could expect to fail. “I used to sit there,” he says, “trying to find 11 guys dumber than me.” That summer, while working as a waiter in the Catskills, he received his first-year grades. He came in fourth in a class of 535—and was invited into the Law Review. Miller called the registrar the very next day: “I thought they made a mistake.”

The next fall, civil procedure professor Benjamin Kaplan took him under his wing. Kaplan “cared if you learned,” Miller says. “Ben instilled in me not only an affection for civil procedure and copyright, but the possibility that academics was a real life.”

Graduating magna cum laude in 1958, Miller joined Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen & Hamilton in Manhattan, where he practiced for three years before accepting an offer from Columbia Law School to become associate director of its Project on International Procedure. There, he worked closely with Kaplan, who was then a reporter for the Advisory Committee on Civil Rules of the Judicial Conference—a position Miller would later hold—and went on to teach first-year procedure alongside the Honorable Jack Weinstein, a giant in the field.

Once Miller entered the classroom, he found a strong, authoritative voice he didn’t know he had. “I wound myself up like a top because I was so petrified,” he recalls. “I over prepared. Then I sort of exploded!” Miller taught at the University of Minnesota Law School and the University of Michigan Law School before returning to his alma mater, where he became Bruce Bromley Professor of Law.

One day he was teaching “the most dull, picayune stuff imaginable,” he says, when after class two men whom he assumed were alums approached him. They were ABC executives. Miller became the first law professor to appear regularly on television, hosting Miller’s Court—the TV show that pioneered making real-life lawyering accessible to a lay audience—from 1979 through 1987. The show created media buzz, and led to a 20-year stint as Good Morning America’s legal editor. He has also hosted a weekly show on Court TV, won an Emmy in 1984 for one of three Fred Friendly seminars he moderated for PBS’s 13-part series The Constitution: That Delicate Balance, and garnered three American Bar Association Gavel Awards for promoting public understanding of the law. “TV was a wonderful experience,” he says, despite channeling his energies away from becoming a judge—an early aspiration.

Miller had been toying with the idea of coming to NYU for two decades. His TV experience confirmed he was a New Yorker at heart. And as his Harvard colleagues retired or passed away, he became closer to the NYU School of Law faculty. Miller, three times divorced with one son and two grandchildren, bought a Chelsea townhouse two years ago, which he shares with Belle, his two-year-old Welsh Terrier. “When you stop being apprehensive about being the best you can be, that’s when you retire. I’m not ready just yet.”

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Those who know him say his encyclopedic knowledge of everything from kites to electronics, coupled with perfect comedic timing, will stand him in good stead in the classroom. “With a wonderfully placed bon mot,” Kaplan says, “he makes his friends convulse with laughter. That’s a great asset for a professor.”

McKenzie will teach civil procedure—in, perhaps, the same classroom where he was a first-year student exactly 10 years ago. “It makes you feel like you’ve accomplished something, stepping back into the same forum but on the other side of the table,” he says. But “it’s an odd feeling, a sense of familiarity and newness at the same time.”

McKenzie, 32, will become the fifth professor of the Law School who is 35 or under. Still a bit uncomfortable with such a grownup salutation, he laughs when he’s addressed as “professor.” But Kaplan is not alone in thinking that McKenzie is a natural for the job.

“What’s striking about Troy is, this is a guy with real presence, unusual presence for someone who’s just 32 years old,” says William Nelson, the Judge Edward Weinfeld Professor of Law, who teaches legal history. Nelson recalls McKenzie’s job talk before the Law School’s Academic Personnel Committee. “He was dropped in the middle of a lion’s den,” he says, “and was extremely good on his feet. Just as he can get up in front of faculty members and not fall apart, he’ll be able to get up in front of students and put them at ease.” And with McKenzie having left Debevoise & Plimpton in Manhattan, where he specialized in bankruptcy litigation for the past three years, NYU will gain another practitioner. “He knows the importance of procedure and substantive law and will bring that real-world understanding to his students,” says Helen Hershkoff, Joel S. and Anne B. Ehrenkranz Professor of Law.

McKenzie is currently at work on a paper, “Judicial Independence, Autonomy, and the Bankruptcy Courts,” which examines the role of bankruptcy judges in the federal court system. Unlike other federal judges, bankruptcy judges do not enjoy the protections of Article III of the Constitution—namely, life tenure and compensation that can’t be diminished—but nonetheless hear cases in federal courts. Supreme Court doctrine and scholarly literature justify that departure, saying that, while bankruptcy cases require judges who have technical expertise, these cases are unlikely to generate the political pressures other federal judges may come under. Plus, bankruptcy cases can be appealed to Article III judges.

McKenzie questions both points. “Bankruptcy may be a specialized process,” he says, but “bankruptcy cases can involve a broad range of subject matters, including multibillion-dollar tort and contract claims.” He also argues that in practice, bankruptcy cases generate few appeals. In his long-term work, he intends to examine other aspects of the bankruptcy process as well as class actions and complex litigation, which have close connections to the bankruptcy process.

McKenzie, a native of Jamaica, moved to the United States in 1980 with his family, settling in New Jersey. His dad, Delroy, 63, a chemist, works at a dairy processing plant. His mom, Monica, a librarian (now deceased) brought home “tons of obscure books,” McKenzie recalls, which sparked his diverse interests. “I’d go through a different hobby every week.” When he was eight, he spent the summer building kites. At ten, he says, “I very scientifically studied every plant in our garden and ended up growing a pound-and-a-half tomato. I cycled through lots of ideas quickly.”

In 1993, he entered Princeton University to study chemical engineering. Sometime in his sophomore year, his roommate “dragged” him to a campus lecture given by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. “I liked the give-and-take style of argument,” McKenzie says. He took some prelaw courses but enjoyed the small classes in his major, and stuck with engineering.

Upon graduation, he turned down an engineering job at Union Carbide, fearing his future might be too dull, and entered NYU School of Law. “I got a first-rate education and fell in love with the place,” says McKenzie, who received an award for most outstanding Law Review Note—a paper about sovereign immunity in bankruptcy. Active in the Black Allied Law Students Association, he says: “Though the numbers of black students weren’t huge, there was definitely a sense of comfort.” After he earned his J.D., he clerked for Judge Pierre Leval of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and then for U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens during the course of two terms.

While taking a 2005-06 sabbatical as a Furman Academic Fellow, McKenzie says, “I realized that I liked being in an academic environment. I liked the luxury of being able to think about problems on an extended basis.” His return to NYU gives him the chance to do just that.

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When Catherine Sharkey was a research fellow at Columbia Law School writing her first law review article, on the disconnect between the theoretical reasons for awarding punitive damages and the actual effect when they are granted, she sent a draft to mentors like her Yale law professor Judge Guido Calabresi of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, for whom she had clerked, but also was brash enough to slip a copy to University of Chicago law professor Richard Epstein, whom she didn’t know but whose work on torts she particularly admired. Upon reading her draft, Epstein picked up the phone and called her. “We had a one-hour conversation that was a litany of everything wrong with my article,” says Sharkey. “He said, ‘You’re taking us to hell and you don’t even have a handbasket!’”

Despite his critique, Epstein was impressed. “I knew from the first conversation that this young professor would soon make it to the ranks of top legal scholars in any area in which she worked,” he recalls. “She was focused and determined, with an immense knowledge of the case law and a real commitment to intellectual rigor.”

Sharkey, 37, who comes to NYU from Columbia Law School, has gotten over the sting of her initial acquaintance with Epstein and now counts him among the impressive academics who inspire her with their passion for teaching and desire to apply their work to real issues; her own work, in turn, elicits high praise from them. Calabresi recalls telling Justice David Souter, who was interviewing Sharkey for a clerkship position, “A quite extraordinary thing has just happened: Cathy has drafted a short opinion from my chambers, and it is the first time I have taken an opinion of this sort and sent it in without changing a word.”

Sharkey’s scholarship and teaching focus on torts. She is forging new theories by using torts and products liability as a lens through which to examine the interplay between private law and public law. She is currently exploring the relationship between civil litigation and administrative regulation in the context of the pharmaceutical industry.

“Federalism in Action: FDA Regulatory Preemption in Pharmaceutical Cases in State Versus Federal Courts” is one of three upcoming law review articles that deal with federal preemption. In them, Sharkey analyzes whether courts and agencies work in tandem or at odds with each other when creating and enforcing regulations. If the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approves a pharmaceutical company’s drug, should that approval shield the company from future tort liability? “I find these areas particularly rich because of the questions of federalism that they inevitably implicate,” she says. Tort law operates at the state level, whereas agencies such as the FDA enforce federal statutes and regulations. “My aim,” she adds, “is to develop models of interaction between courts, agencies and Congress.”

There is a graceful push and pull to Sharkey’s scholarship and teaching that represents her love of theory and her devotion to practical problem-solving. This tension has played out in the evolution of her academic and professional career as well. Sharkey attended Yale as an undergraduate, where she first encountered economics in classes taught by renowned economists William Nordhaus and Nobel Prize-winner James Tobin. “I was mesmerized by the subject matter and how their research related to actual ongoing public policy issues,” Sharkey says. Reaching her senior year with more than enough credits—she would later graduate summa cum laude—Sharkey took off her first semester and pursued an independent study, an on-the-ground examination of the bail bond system in New Haven. She collected data from bail commission records and interviewed bail bondsmen, ultimately determining that the private sector, represented by bail bondsmen, mitigates racial discrimination in the public sphere, where courts set higher bail for black and Hispanic male detainees. She went on to win Yale’s prize for the best original economics thesis and found her work developed further by professors Ian Ayres and Joel Waldfogel in a 1994 Stanford Law Review article, “A Market Test for Race Discrimination in Bail Setting.”

Fast-talking and energetic, Sharkey was also an All-American goalie for the Yale women’s lacrosse team, becoming captain and most-valuable player as well as one of ten finalists for the NCAA Woman of the Year in 1992. While she didn’t win the latter designation, she was granted a Rhodes Scholarship at Oxford, where she pursued a master’s in economics. But the practical side of her won out: “Economics was theoretical,” says Sharkey; “in law I saw the problem-solving. I was influenced by pioneers like Richard Posner who were taking economic analysis and applying it to legal quandaries.” Professor Noah Feldman, now on the faculty of Harvard Law School, says of Sharkey, his friend since they both clerked for Justice Souter, “It’s rare to master the abstract theory and then match it up with the way things actually happen in the real world; Cathy does it in a smooth, seamless way.” He adds, “She has the whole academic package.”

Sharkey grew up in Baltimore, the third of four children. Her mother is a professor of management science at Loyola College. Her father was a commercial litigation attorney at a Baltimore firm, and is now an administrative law judge in Washington, D.C. “I thought I’d charted my own path,” she says. “But I think there were subtle influences.” She will have a chance to see whether law is destiny for the next generation, too, though she and her partner, Ina Bort, a partner at Kornstein Veisz Wexler & Pollard who practices commercial and matrimonial litigation, are doing their best to remain neutral. The couple have an eight-month-old son, Caleb. Recently, friends gave Caleb a T-shirt that reads, “Future Lawyer.” He hasn’t worn it yet.

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As he wrapped up, Issacharoff, who was born in Argentina, raised in the United States and is Jewish, joked that his own prospects in the democratic process had been shortcircuited: The Argentinean constitution prohibits any non-Catholic from being the chief executive, and in America, the commander in chief must be native-born. “Sometimes,” Issacharoff lamented, “you can’t catch a break.”

“He’s got lots of energy and lots of ideas,” says Professor of Law Kevin Davis, who is working with Kingsbury to create courses online. “He can deal with students and faculty, keep writing and still do research.”

In his new role, Kingsbury will oversee the Office of Graduate Admissions and the Office of Graduate Academic Affairs, taking over from Joseph Weiler, Joseph Straus Professor of Law, who held the chair of the graduate division and directed the Hauser Global Law School Program.

In that vein, Kingsbury, who like the vast majority of the Law School’s graduate students was born and raised abroad, is sensitive about making NYU a welcoming community. “It’s always an issue at a big law school like this one—how to make people feel at home as individuals.”

Although he grew up in the Netherlands, Kingsbury is a New Zealand national who earned his LL.B. there at the University of Canterbury. He was a Rhodes Scholar at Balliol College in Oxford, where he attained an M.Phil. in international relations and a D.Phil. in law. In 1990, he became a University Lecturer at Oxford, came to the United States as a professor of law at Duke in 1993 and joined the NYU law faculty in 1998.

Kingsbury’s other position, as director of the Institute for International Law and Justice (IILJ), dovetails nicely with his new role. At the IILJ he works on issues relating to indigenous populations, and heads the program in the history and theory of international law. One of his initiatives is the Private Military Companies Project, which studies the role of mercenaries in conflicts such as the underreported mid-1990s civil war in Sierra Leone. And Kingsbury also intends to launch a colloquium in 2008 about legal affairs and global business, dealing with topics like international labor law or cross-border mergers and acquisitions.

Says Davis, “He presses students to work on projects with real-world payoffs.”

Okay, then, which of your initiatives mattered to you most? And next you will ask which of my five children do I like most? Let me try to list my five favorites.

The Global Fellows Program was one of the fundamental building blocks of “The Turn to Scholarship”—the principal motto of my tenure as director. It sets the gold standard for such programs. The soaring number and quality of the applications we receive, the success of the Global Working Paper Series and the strong and abiding ties created with our fellows tell the story.

I am very attached to the new doctoral program. We provide full funding, which I believe is unique among U.S. law schools. We have become extremely selective, picking but a handful of the most promising candidates and then following them assiduously as skeletal research plans become fully fledged dissertations.

NYU’s graduate program, composed mostly of overseas students, is larger than most of our peer schools’. Foreign students are not token visitors but a critical mass, which redefines our classrooms, affects our institutional culture and reconstitutes our intellectual community. We truly are a global law school. The new Graduate Division is an expression of this commitment and awash with new initiatives. Examples? The Lawyering Program for LL.M.s— another first.

Singapore: Enter a classroom on the world-class campus of the National University of Singapore. Shut your eyes. You could be in Vanderbilt Hall: Students from the United States, Europe, Latin America, Australia and Asia; teachers—Philip Alston, Stephen Gillers, etc.—are familiar. While some classes are the same as those taught in New York City, others are quite different. Taught by the National University of Singapore Faculty of Law, the leading law school in Asia, students will be absorbing knowledge they could not obtain anywhere but Asia itself. The combination has no parallel. The effort of all concerned is enormous. So are the rewards. Students will emerge after a strenuous year with an NYU LL.M. and an NUS LL.M.—testament to a new frontier of global legal education at its most imaginative.

Last, least, but most fun: I have installed a webcam in my office window overlooking the courtyard of Vanderbilt Hall. Beautiful and vibrant in all seasons, the courtyard is a spatial expression of the excitement of NYU Law. I love looking up from my desk and watching life pass by; occasionally an overseas student will be talking on a cell phone to a loved one far away.

In announcing your decision to step down as director, Dean Richard Revesz mentioned three books you were hoping now to complete. Is it really true that you are writing a Jewish cookbook? Have you heard the joke about the definition of kosher? If it’s good, it can’t be kosher!

There is no shortage of Jewish cookbooks, but to read most of them you would get the impression that Jews eat only on the Sabbath and the various festivals—Okay, on Sunday they eat the leftovers and the rest of the week they order takeout, usually Chinese. And that Jews eat only meat—and if they will make a concession to vegetables, potatoes will do nicely, thank you.

My cookbook, Kosher, but Really Good…! is an exercise in the unexpected. Take the chapter entitled “Land of Milk and Honey?” My wife and I give various wonderful combinations of cheeses and honeys. One of my hobbies for years has been beekeeping (yes, in our New York City backyard). And in our pantry we have a huge (global!) collection of honeys, from the bittersweet Sardinian Corbezzolo to the perfumed Tasmanian leatherwood. Once you have combined cheese and honey, you risk never wanting either of them on their own.

Your books speak to an impressive range of interests. Tell us about the one on the Bible. The Genesis of Our Civilization—Five Essays on the Book of Genesis is another exercise in the unexpected. Consider an essay on Eve and Adam, in which I argue that Eve, in that very act of transgression, paradoxically completes our creation in the image of God as sovereign moral agents with the capacity to say No, and hence establishes the only position from which one can also truly say Yes. Or an essay on marriage, which examines the surprisingly diverse relationships between Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebecca, Jacob and the tragic but ultimately favored Leah, and Jacob and beautiful, petulant Rachel. You will never think of patriarchy in quite the same way.

Okay. Now a law book, but what does geology have to do with law? A Geology of Public International Law is the title of the third book. Well, it is about accretion and a different way of examining the evolution of international law throughout the 20th century. The metaphor is really quite useful when we discover—taking a sounding of international law circa 2007—how much of 1907 is still present in its very structure.

So no more institution-building at NYU? Let’s talk again next year….

Richard Stewart, University Professor and John Edward Sexton Professor of Law who became the director of the Hauser Global Law School Program on June 1, hopes to bridge the divide between the developed and developing nations by reaching out to universities in Africa, Asia and Latin America. By bringing academics and lawyers from these often- excluded nations to NYU, and sending students and faculty there, he aims to turn out students who can think about global issues by broadening their experience.

As a founder of the fledgling discipline of global administrative law, Stewart devotes much of his work to grappling with issues of accountability in global governance. “Legal education and legal research, like legal problems, are global now,” says Stewart, who is also an environmental law expert. “Our goal is to engage our students in an educational program that allows them to address these issues not just from the perspective of New York, but from that of Capetown, Santiago or Beijing.”

Stewart credits his predecessors, Norman Dorsen, the Frederick I. and Grace A. Stokes Professor of Law, and Joseph Weiler, the Joseph Straus Professor of Law, with creating a terrific base. “Professor Weiler strengthened the academic orientation of not just Hauser but our LL.M. program and our Ph.D. program,” Stewart says. “The idea of partnerships is his. So I’m really very much building on what he did.” Stewart intends to build teaching and research partnerships with the Catholic University in Santiago, Chile, the National University of Singapore (where Weiler has already built ties) and the University of Capetown. He also hopes to forge new cooperative arrangements with law schools in China and India. While his focus will be on developing countries, he plans to strengthen an existing relationship with Oxford University.

Faculty from partner institutions would continue to teach at NYU, as they have since the inception of the Hauser Program in 1995. But under Stewart’s plan, NYU faculty and students would teach and study abroad either physically or via virtual classrooms. There would also be joint research projects, conferences, publications and continuing legal-education programs on global issues affecting developing regions. “We want to reach out to the developing regions,” says Stewart. “We now have global faculty and scholars coming here. The next step is to link up with students and faculty there, to be able to learn more from their perspective.”

Stewart, by all accounts, possesses the qualifications to steer a preeminent global legal program. He is the rare academic who has moved in and out of the Ivory Tower. After graduating from Harvard Law School, he won a Rhodes Scholarship to do his master’s at Oxford University, followed by a clerkship with Justice Stewart Potter. In the late 1960s, he practiced law at Covington & Burling, and in 1973 was appointed special counsel to the Senate Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities that was investigating Watergate. He left a professorship at Harvard Law School when he was appointed assistant attorney general for environment and natural resources in the U.S. Department of Justice during the George H.W. Bush administration. There he developed a market-based emissions trading system to limit greenhouse gases, which was later adopted by the 1997 Kyoto Protocol.

Stewart joined NYU in 1992, and in the late 1990s headed two environmental legal-assistance projects in China for the Center on Environmental and Land Use Law. He and Benedict Kingsbury, the Murry and Ida Becker Professor of Law, are credited with defining the field of global administrative law at a joint NYU-Oxford workshop convened in October 2004, “Towards a Global Administrative Law? Legality, Accountability, and Participation in Global Governance.” That workshop was followed by a similar conference in the spring of 2005, and yearly conferences in Viterbo, Italy.

“He created a new field that has enormous political and legal importance for the world,” says Carlos Rosenkrantz, a professor of law at the University of Buenos Aires, who taught in the Hauser Program in the spring. After a conference held in Buenos Aires last March, Stewart trekked with Rosenkrantz and others through the delta near the city. “He’s very sensitive to different landscapes, cultures and traditions, which is essential for someone who wants to lead a project that’s global in nature,” he says. “And he’s genetically engineered for the job,” says Rosenkrantz wryly, explaining that Stewart alone among their group was not bitten by mosquitoes.

Dorsen, founding director of Hauser, has said that whoever leads the program needs a high profile to attract top foreign faculty. “He knows many foreign law professors on several continents, and foreign faculty like to work with him,” says Dorsen of Stewart. “Anyone at that level will attract great people.”