That counsel, which Yoshino eventually rejected, helped inspire his award-winning work. Covering: The Hidden Assault On Our Civil Rights (Random House, 2006) is a memoir that blends his personal identity struggles as a gay, Japanese American with legal arguments in order to question whether assimilation is always beneficial. “We have a deep-seated belief as Americans that we all should melt into the pot,” says Yoshino, a visiting professor for two years who joined NYU Law in July. “But if the demand for conformity is itself illegitimate, then assimilation is a symptom of discrimination rather than an escape from it.”

In Covering, Yoshino discusses three stages of coming out: “conversion,” “passing,” and “covering.” The latter two terms are adopted from the work of sociologist Erving Goffman. Conversion is the period in which a gay individual longs to become straight. Passing is the phase in which a gay individual has accepted his homosexuality, but hides it from society. And covering is a more subtle demand for assimilation, in which the individual is openly gay but feels pressured not to “flaunt.” Covering is as much an assault on a gay individual’s civil rights as the 1981 case in which an African-American woman was fired by American Airlines for wearing her hair in cornrows, Yoshino says. “His work gave us new categories for thinking about the types of discrimination that are relatively invisible to most people,” says David Golove, Hiller Family Foundation Professor of Law. “He’s had a major impact within constitutional and discrimination law.” In fact, Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens used Yoshino’s arguments, in part, to fashion a dissent from the Court’s 2000 majority ruling that the Boy Scouts of America could exclude gays. Yoshino also coauthored a key amicus brief in Lawrence v. Texas, the 2003 case that struck down sodomy statutes across the country. “He is a superb lawyer who has reshaped anti-discrimination law by making us understand how forcing people to ‘cover’ diminishes their authenticity and personhood,” says Yale Law School Dean Harold Hongju Koh.

Yoshino also discloses in his book his own identity struggles. As a first-generation American, Yoshino felt uncomfortable assimilating while growing up. His father, a professor at Harvard Business School, and his mother, a homemaker, raised Yoshino and his older sister in a suburb of Boston. Yoshino attended Phillips Exeter Academy, and he and his sister spent summers in Japan attending public school “to inhabit a Japanese body—to rise, to straighten, and to bow: to sit ramrod straight in my high collared uniform,” he writes.

His parents would tell Yoshino and his sister to be “100 percent American in America, and 100 percent Japanese in Japan.” He says his sister, who now lives in Tokyo, as do his parents, perfected these independent cultural identities in a way he never could. “I think in many ways my exposure to an extremely conformist culture in Japan fueled my understanding of assimilation long before I had any consciousness of being gay,” Yoshino explains.

Until he was a young adult, he says he was stuck in the “conversion” stage. After graduating summa cum laude with a degree in English literature from Harvard in 1991, he earned a Master of Science in management studies at Oxford in 1993, on a Rhodes Scholarship. While at Oxford, though, he says, “I routinely went to the college chapel and prayed to the god I didn’t believe in to be straight.” At 22, he came out to his parents, but when he attended Yale Law, he continued to “pass” as straight to classmates. By the time he received his J.D. in 1996, he was openly gay, yet he acceded to his colleague’s covering demands—to write about and teach nongay topics—until he couldn’t dissemble any longer.

He joined the Yale faculty after clerking for judge and former Yale Law School Dean Guido Calabresi of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. (He earned tenure at Yale in 2003 and became the inaugural Guido Calabresi Professor of Law in 2006.) Also a deputy dean for intellectual life, he coordinated the non-curricular academic life of the law school, such as scheduling workshops and student fellowships.

Currently, Yoshino is working on an article called “The New Equal Protection,” in which he proposes shifting the legal paradigm from group-based equality to one that protects liberty for all. He argues that the samesex marriage debate, for instance, should be framed not as the right of gays to be equal to straights but as the right of all people to marry the person they love.

His English lit background continues to shine through Yoshino’s work. NYU University Professor Carol Gilligan, who cotaught a Shakespeare seminar with Yoshino, says: “You can’t read [Covering] without being stunned by the sheer poetry of his writing.” Drawing on his seminar with Gilligan, Yoshino is writing a book tentatively called Shakespeare’s Law, in which he pairs five sets of Shakespeare’s plays to show how the Bard argues both sides of fundamental questions of justice.

Yoshino, meanwhile, is eager to settle in at NYU. “It’s important for people at some point to get away from their teachers, in the same way that you break from your parents,” says Yoshino. “I came for the city, then I stayed for the school. I really fell in love with this institution.”

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A dedicated public servant who previously worked for Ambassador Paul Bremer in setting up a transitional government in Iraq, Rascoff nonetheless sees joining NYU in June as a professor and faculty codirector at the Center on Law and Security as a logical move. “I firmly believe that shaping the American response to terrorism and creating a new architecture for counter-terrorism law is as much an act of public service as providing day-to-day assessments of terrorist threats,” says Rascoff.

Rascoff’s specialty is national security law, with an emphasis on counter-terrorism law—a burgeoning field that examines the sources, allocation and limits of government authority in protecting its citizens from terrorist attacks. While elements of national security law are relatively well-established in the law school curriculum, counter-terrorism law is still in its infancy. “We see ourselves as a leader in this new area of law. Having him join our faculty will be important as we move forward in that project,” says Dean Richard Revesz, who first glimpsed Rascoff’s scholarly abilities when the two collaborated on a law review article about risk regulation in the fall of 2001. “Even as a recent law school graduate, he had the ability, maturity and creativity of a seasoned academic.”

One of three siblings, Rascoff was raised in New Rochelle by his dad, Joel, a retired kidney specialist, and his mom, Barbara, a homemaker and perennial volunteer. An independent thinker, fluent in Arabic and Hebrew, he specialized in Islamic studies at Harvard. During college, he spent one summer working on the Pentagon’s Middle East desk, another at the State Department. After graduating in 1996, he received a Marshall Scholarship to do a second bachelor’s degree at Oxford University where he studied philosophy, politics and economics. Viewing the legal profession as “the priesthood of American public servants,” he attended Yale Law, graduating in 2001.

Outgoing and charismatic, with flaming red hair and a flair for dramatic outfits, Rascoff always stood out, recalls college and law school buddy Professor Jedediah Purdy of Duke University. “He does orange and pink well, and can carry off a bow tie,” he says.

In spring 2003, in between clerkships that included a year with Supreme Court Justice David H. Souter, Rascoff assisted Ambassador Bremer in Baghdad. Sleeping with 25 other people on cots covered with mosquito netting in the auxiliary kitchen of Saddam Hussein’s Republican Palace, he spent his days meeting with Iraqi officials and crisscrossing the country, talking with everyday Iraqis. “Sam was one of a tiny number of advisors who spoke Arabic and understood the political context,” says Professor Noah Feldman of Harvard Law, who was in Baghdad with him.

One day Feldman, Rascoff and a couple of other advisors drove without an escort into the Shiite areas south of Baghdad to talk to Iraqi citizens. “A couple of weeks later, Muhammad Baqir al-Hakim was killed by a car bomb in the same spot where we had just stood,” recalls Feldman. Rascoff describes his time there succinctly: “I had a front row seat when consequential decisions were being made.”

After Rascoff spent two years practicing litigation at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, NYPD Commissioner Raymond Kelly recruited him to set up the intelligence analysis unit. “We relied on Sam Rascoff’s superb legal training, combined with his extraordinary knowledge and command of geopolitics, to create an intelligence analyst program that has earned worldwide acclaim,” says Kelly. “He was personally responsible for recruiting top notch talent into the NYPD and did so with remarkable success.” Much of what Rascoff did there remains confidential, but he is willing to say that his job ran the gamut, from monitoring cyberspace chat rooms to participating in operational activities.

Rascoff is currently working on an article entitled “National Security Federalism,” in which he argues that state and local entities should play a larger role in setting national security policy, especially with regard to counter-terrorism. “National security so far has been relatively impervious to analysis through the lens of federalism,” he says. “But with counter-terrorism figuring prominently in the security agenda, we’ve come to appreciate that local government agencies, such as police departments, will inevitably shoulder more responsibility in combating today’s threats.”

Those who know Rascoff predict he will make an easy adjustment to academia. “A lot of young associates are fairly invisible. That never happened with Sam. Everybody knew who he was,” says Meyer Koplow, executive partner at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, adding, “He’s going to make a great professor because he’s just so approachable.”

Rascoff and his wife Lauren, 29, a resident in obstetrics and gynecology, live in the city. They both frequent the opera, and occasionally Rascoff finds time to play golf. Rascoff, a cantor in his synagogue, also attends daily services and enjoys having coffee afterward with two congregants, one in his 70s; the other in his 80s. “I always hit it off with the older set,” he says.

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Kane sees this general enthusiasm for the subject as natural. “This is a body of law that tells you who’s going to pay for what. That goes to the core of what a lot of people care about,” he says.

Previously in private practice specializing in international tax law, Kane joins the faculty this fall from the University of Virginia School of Law, where he has taught since 2003. “He’s one of the best junior tax scholars in the country, and clearly the best in international tax, leaving aside a handful of people who are considerably more senior,” says Daniel Shaviro, Wayne Perry Professor of Taxation. “Mitchell is thus positioned to be an important leader in the field for decades to come, and I’m delighted that he’ll be here.”

Kane is best known for his 2004 piece, “Strategy and Cooperation in National Responses to International Tax Arbitrage,” published in the Emory Law Journal. International tax arbitrage refers to instances where taxpayers intentionally structure transactions to take advantage of variations in the tax laws across jurisdictions. The academic debate about such arbitrage had generally centered on the question of whether such tax planning activity is problematic. “My key contribution was to suggest that one could best understand arbitrage transactions not as planning opportunities for taxpayers, but rather as opportunities for governments, in their responses to the transactions, to behave strategically in the battle to attract global capital flows,” he says.

Recently, Kane has cultivated an interest in the role of tax policy in promoting capital flows to the developing world. In a working paper called “Bootstraps, Poverty Traps, and Poverty Pits: Tax Treaties as Novel Tools for Development Finance,” Kane proposes a financing technique that he says offers significant improvements over common sovereign debt arrangements. Typically, countries that attract foreign investors to build a plant or another business have the primary ability to tax any profits. These tax revenues are used to repay foreign creditors, as well as for other purposes. Rather than waiting for a payment from a country that might already be in debt, Kane proposes that developed nations negotiate treaties in which they transfer capital now in exchange for the primary right to tax income streams in the future. Critics contend “they’re trading back a piece of their sovereignty,” says Kane. But he argues, “It’s a sovereign decision to raise money more effectively. By world standards, our tax and compliance system is a pretty good machine.” So why not leave the taxing up to us?

Kane and his two siblings were raised in Norfolk, Virginia, by their parents Peter, 70, and Claudia, 64. An engineer by training, Peter now owns a family bar/restaurant; Claudia, who also owns a deli, was a food broker. A self-professed loner and nerd for most of his youth—in sixth grade he tackled Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov—he came out of his shell in 11th grade when he joined the school’s golf team.

Kane entered Yale University interested in computer science, but soon became enamored with philosophy. By sophomore year, he was a philosophy major with a focus on the philosophy of law—having read Ronald Dworkin’s work—as well as the philosophy of criminal law.

Graduating from Yale in 1993, he enrolled in a joint degree program at the University of Virginia, earning his J.D. in 1996, and an M.A. in philosophy in 1997. That same year he started practice at the D.C. office of Covington & Burling, splitting his time between tax and litigation. Two weeks into his first litigation case, he was given boxes of documents to review. “After the first two boxes, I begged to be put full-time into the tax group,” he recalls, finding the mental gymnastics required to puzzle through the tax code far more compelling than “plowing through mounds of paper looking for a needle in a haystack.”

Out to lunch one day with his tax colleagues in 1999, he learned that his firm wanted to bring an associate to London. He raced back to his office to call his wife, Jessica. “We adored living abroad,” says Kane, whose practice morphed into international tax law during his three years in London.

In 2002, after Kane returned to the U.S., a mentor invited him to take a fellowship at the University of Virginia. He was offered a teaching position the following year. “I was 32 when I started, and the students didn’t look much younger than I did. It was incredibly intimidating,” recalls Kane, who spent two months preparing his first three lectures.

In addition to visiting in Fall 2007, Kane has attended NYU’s annual Colloquium on Tax Policy and Public Finance. “The energy of the place is incredible,” he says. “There’s something about NYU where I always feel like there’s 30 things going on that I want to be doing. That kind of richness of faculty dialogue is very appealing.” Aside from working with his tax colleagues, he hopes to rekindle his interest in philosophy by attending and presenting the Colloquium in Legal, Political and Social Philosophy, run by Professors Dworkin, Liam Murphy and Thomas Nagel.

Having been a visiting professor at several universities in the past two years, including Harvard and Columbia, Kane is eager to settle down with Jessica and their children: Olivia, five, and Simon, two. Kane, who inherited recipes from his Alsatian mother, does the cooking at home. “I’m the master of the one-pot, stick-to-your-ribs, French country recipes,” he says.

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Howse had difficulty reading and writing until about age nine, when he learned how to form words on a typewriter based on the spatial organization of the keyboard. “All of a sudden there was this great sense of liberation,” says Howse, who has since learned he is dyslexic. “The sense of empowerment from overcoming that kind of obstacle may have put me into overdrive.”

An understatement indeed.

Soon Howse was a voracious reader, tackling serious literature. Though he still suffers from aspects of dyslexia—he can’t drive a car—he now reads Plato in the original Greek (albeit slowly), writes extensively on 20th-century political philosophers Leo Strauss and Alexandre Kojeve, is an expert in international trade law, and has shaped public policy in issues ranging from human rights to global warming. “He’s a rare combination of somebody who knows international trade and investment law in detail, yet he’s got a broad-ranging and creative intellectual outlook,” says Richard Stewart, the John Edward Sexton Professor of Law.

Howse joined the faculty in June from the University of Michigan Law School, where he taught international law and legal and political philosophy. A full-time academic, he also has a high profile in public policy circles—he writes prolifically and has advised government agencies and international organizations, such as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, and the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights.

“Rob fully understands the policy and political context in which trade decisions are made, and this sets him apart from many academics in the international trade area,” says Susan Esserman, chair of the international department at D.C.-based Steptoe & Johnson and a former deputy U.S. trade representative. “He has a great eye for emerging issues in the field, and he is endlessly creative,” says Esserman, who has written with Howse for the Council on Foreign Relations’ Foreign Affairs magazine and The Financial Times.

He’s best known for cowriting The Regulation of International Trade (Routledge, 1995), a comprehensive look at the evolution of international trade theory and policy, which included analysis of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and the World Trade Organization.

Currently, he’s juggling a number of projects. Having been the principal trade expert for the Renewable Energy and International Law Project (a consortium with Baker & McKenzie and Yale University), he recently attended the first high-level policy meeting exclusively focused on climate change and trade, organized by the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He is collaborating with Ruti Teitel, Ernst C. Stiefel Professor of Comparative Law at New York Law School, on a series of projects that analyze the debate on globalization in relation to the human rights revolution in international law. He’s writing a book tentatively called Rehearing the Case of Leo Strauss. In 2004, he self-published Mozart: A Novel, and he’s currently writing another piece of fiction.

Raised non-religious by parents of Protestant origin, mainly in a predominantly Orthodox Jewish neighborhood of Toronto, he became fascinated with philosophy. “I had a sense of wonderment about the different ways of leading our lives that came from this experience of otherness around me,” he says.

In 11th grade, after being removed from his history class for misbehavior, he was put into an independent study. “I used this chance to study the themes that interested me, including the religious versus the secular life,” he says. He came upon Strauss, one of many figures who influenced his career.

Howse entered the University of Toronto to study Straussian thought under the philosopher (and soon to be best-selling author) Allan Bloom. He graduated in 1980 with a B.A. in philosophy and political science. When Bloom left for the University of Chicago, Howse enrolled there, hoping to earn a master’s degree. But Howse, who was politically left-leaning, left Chicago disillusioned after a few disagreements with Bloom and his neoconservative followers.

In 1982, he joined the Canadian diplomatic service. “[There] I developed a fascination for law as a discourse of diplomacy in international politics,” says Howse. As a member of the Policy Planning Secretariat, Howse worked on then-Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau’s global peace initiative. And as the Canadian Cultural attaché in Belgrade, he promoted Canadian rock-and-roll while also working on the former Yugoslavia’s debt refinancing negotiations.

He returned to the University of Toronto, earning a law degree in 1989 and a master’s from Harvard in 1990. Howse started teaching at the University of Toronto, where he stayed until joining the University of Michigan Law School in 1999. He’s had a long-standing relationship with NYU, which Howse is ready to formalize. As his research has moved increasingly in the direction of foundational and conceptual questions in international law, “NYU has seemed the logical center,” he says, citing his interest in the history and theory of international law program. Moreover, his recent focus on climate change and trade is an excellent fit with the Global Administrative Law Project. On leave for the fall, he’ll teach international investment law and the history and theory of international law in the spring.

Howse is undergoing a divorce, and has no children. In keeping with his public policy positions, he leads a consciously responsible lifestyle—biking and walking whenever possible and buying organic. “I know from my research there are tradeoffs,” he says, “but overall, I think that the result is greener than otherwise.”

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At Stanford University, his home since 1983, Ferejohn, Carolyn S. G. Munro Professor of Political Science, has chaired the department and taught in the philosophy department and the Graduate School of Business. Currently, he is a fellow at the Hoover Institution. A non-lawyer, he nonetheless has been teaching one semester at the NYU School of Law since 1993, and will join the faculty full-time in 2009. “He does everything,” says Lewis Kornhauser, Alfred B. Engelberg Professor of Law, with whom he coteaches the Colloquium on Law, Economics and Politics. “He has great curiosity, a penetrating mind, and can talk about anything that goes on in the Law School.”

Ferejohn is known for his work on voters and the responsiveness of their elected officials. He is also credited with being one of the founders of positive political thinking (PPT), a methodology that uses mathematical models, economics and game theory to analyze the workings of political institutions. “John is the great positive political theorist of his generation,” says Kenneth Shepsle, George D. Markham Professor of Government at Harvard University. “When he was starting out in the early 1970s, PPT was extremely novel. It was through a lot of John’s work that it became much more mainstream.”

Ferejohn was born on an Army base in Deming, New Mexico. His father, George, a high school dropout who once worked as a janitor at Columbia University, became a bombardier instructor in the U.S. Army Air Corps, then went on to attend Cornell University and Harvard Medical School. He died tragically in his sleep at age 33 when Ferejohn was just seven years old. His mother, Olga Collazo, married physicist Robert Bjork and moved the family to Santa Monica.

At age 12, Ferejohn started playing the clarinet, saxophone and flute. Within a few years, he was playing at jazz clubs, intending to be a jazz musician. He married his high-school sweetheart, Sally, now a retired elementary school teacher, and worked his way through San Fernando State College doing payroll accounting for an aerospace company. Realizing soon enough that playing the sax wouldn’t pay the bills, he focused on his schoolwork and was accepted at Stanford University.

During his first year at Stanford in 1968, he “discovered that it was possible to use deductive thinking to see how politicians do things. I got interested in exploring the elegant and simple idea that complex political institutions had a simple underlying logic.” He loaded up on mathematics and economics courses, and in 1972, he earned his Ph.D. in political science. In 1974, he published his first of five books, Pork Barrel Politics: Rivers and Harbors Legislation, 1947-1968 (Stanford University Press).

Both Pork Barrel Politics and his second book, The Personal Vote: Constituency Service and Electoral Independence (Harvard University Press, 1987), which he coauthored with Bruce Cain of the University of California, Berkeley and Morris Fiorina of Stanford, use PPT and game theory strategies, as well as statistical modeling, to look at issues such as how politicians build support and, conversely, how constituents control politicians. “The logic of majority rule says don’t be too hard to please,” or you’ll be left out of the majority, Ferejohn says. “You better find a way to prevent politicians from playing you off against others. So essentially, to control a politician, you need to come to some sort of agreement with other voters on a single evaluative criterion, such as the liberal or conservative dimension, and then not set so high a standard that the politician will simply ignore it.”

Currently, he’s coauthoring a book tentatively called Super Statutes, which challenges the belief that the fundamental rights enjoyed by Americans are protected by the Constitution. “Instead of doing constitutional law from the top down, we want to look at the real rights we have and rely on day to day, from the bottom up,” he says. Written with William Eskridge Jr., John A. Garver Professor of Jurisprudence at Yale Law School, and expanded from an earlier article, the book is due to be published by Yale University Press in 2009.

Just as he improvises jazz compositions, Ferejohn enjoys taking an “eclectic” approach to academics. In addition to using techniques of PPT, he looks forward to collaborating with NYU legal philosophers Thomas Nagel and Liam Murphy, among others. “Part of law—constitutional law in particular—is really an applied area of political and moral philosophy. And NYU is really strong in these areas,” says Ferejohn, who has taught political philosophy at both California Institute of Technology and Stanford. “The nice thing about applied as opposed to theoretical approaches to these topics is that one can see the conflicts in sharper relief, and political scientists have a congenital love for conflict.”

Joining NYU full-time will allow him to focus more on the philosophical approach to law. Plus, Ferejohn, who has three children and three grandchildren, will be able to explore Manhattan’s exciting music scene—and its mouthwatering culinary offerings. He also looks forward to performing in some of the downtown jazz clubs he’s played in the past. And who knows? He may even twist foie gras ribbons into bow ties in the kitchen of the city’s molecular-cooking mecca, wd~50.

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Petro joined NYU as an assistant professor in 1950, shortly after earning his J.D. and LL.M. from the University of Chicago and University of Michigan law schools, respectively. He focused on labor, antitrust and contract law and also taught constitutional law. “Sylvester Petro was an unabashed libertarian, strongly maintaining that government regulation of the economy was undesirable in almost all circumstances,” says Frederick I. and Grace A. Stokes Professor of Law Norman Dorsen, Petro’s colleague for 11 years. “He also believed, and here he was in a distinct minority, that federal and state regulatory statutes were unconstitutional as exceeding the power of government.”

Dorsen remembers, however, that Petro “made his arguments vigorously but politely and with a certain sense of humor.” It is this last characteristic that distinguished Petro’s teaching, says former student Harvey Ishofsky ’71. “His love for law was reflected in how he taught in classrooms. He was both moving and witty.”

According to his family, Petro was a founder of the Conservative Party of New York in the 1960s and a member of the classical liberal Mont Pelerin Society, and worked for the Foundation for Economic Education and the National Right to Work Committee. Among many titles, he wrote The Labor Policy of the Free Society, The Kohler Strike and The Kingsport Strike.

He left NYU in 1972 to join the faculty of Wake Forest University School of Law and taught labor law there until 1978. Petro also directed an institute for labor policy analysis, which has since closed.

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Current and former students and accomplished colleagues gathered to pay homage to Amsterdam’s legend—as a leading law professor, advocate and litigator for capital defense and other civil rights causes. But more so, their tributes honored the man with intimate portraits of a teacher, a friend and an extraordinary human being.

Professor of Clinical Law Bryan Stevenson had only the highest praise for his colleague and mentor, who has taught at NYU since 1981. “I don’t believe there’s any lawyer, any litigator who has had a more profound influence on social justice in this country in the last 40 years,” he said, adding, “He is a very uncommon person.”

Nearly everyone mentioned Amsterdam’s typical practice of sending emails in the wee hours of the morning. Seemingly apocryphal stories of legal brilliance—like that cheeky feat of citing a Supreme Court case, volume and page number included, before a skeptical judge, or dictating perfect legal briefs via the phone—were confirmed true. And try as they might to each say something different about the man, all were in awe of his dedication and caring.

David Kendall, known for representing President Bill Clinton during the Monica Lewinsky scandal, began his career working with Amsterdam at the NAACP Legal Defense andEducation Fund (LDF) during the mid-1960s. He shared a poem Amsterdam had once included in correspondence as a testament to his wit and playfulness. Former U.S. Solicitor General Seth Waxman, who won a 2005 victory in Roper v. Simmons, in which the Supreme Court ruled the execution of juveniles violated the Eighth Amendment, confessed that an additional reward for the privilege of defending death-row inmates is having close access to Amsterdam.

Even though all spoke from vastly divergent places in their careers—from law student to senior partner—all were grateful for Amsterdam’s wisdom.

“There’s no one in this business that I know of…that works harder than Tony does,” said George Kendall, another LDF veteran. “He leads, and teaches by example.”

Underscoring Kendall’s point were tributes from Amsterdam’s former student Dimitri Dubé ’05, now a clerk to Judge Theodore McKee of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, and a current one, Robyn Mar ’08. As the most recent beneficiaries of Amsterdam’s teaching, Dubé and Mar described the same man his peers had—affirmation of the respect with which Amsterdam treats everyone, regardless of their age or career status.

When the honoree finally accepted his award, he tried to dismiss the kind words. In fact, his short speech exemplified all of the qualities attributed to him—modesty, humor, intelligence and sensitivity. “It’s staggering to see so many friends and so many good people so deluded,” he said, but as the attendees stood to applaud him, Amsterdam couldn’t hide the fact that he was truly grateful and deeply moved.

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At both day-long events, scholars gave presentations focusing on themes central to Dworkin’s work, and he, in turn, commented on each. At the Norway symposium, held last November at the University of Bergen, Professor Jeremy Waldron explored Dworkin’s theory of the role that integrity plays in the law. Waldron, who had Dworkin as his doctoral mentor at Oxford, noted Dworkin sees the legal enterprise as “primarily keeping faith with a coherent body of principle that governs all of us in the exercise of power over one another.”

The NYU seminar, in April, included talks from Cass Sunstein of the University of Chicago Law School and Lawrence Sager of the University of Texas School of Law. Sunstein spoke on his longheld view of judicial minimalism, the idea that judges should avoid sweeping pronouncements in their decisions. A few intellectual clashes occurred. In “Social Rights and Legal Interpretation,” Sager noted Dworkin’s work had influenced him, but took issue with his view that there are no social and economic rights enshrined in the U.S. Constitution.

Dworkin’s views also continued to surprise. NYU Law Professor and Vice Dean Liam Murphy, who organized the symposium, said he and others had known Dworkin a long time, yet “we all felt we had learned something new.” One example: Dworkin’s view about the connection between legal rights and the appropriateness of judicial review. Dworkin was clearly taken by the speakers. “There are many dimensions to the honor I’m receiving,” he said at the Norway meeting, “but perhaps the most significant is the character of the people who have come to help us celebrate this occasion, and I’m very grateful.”

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“She has been a productive critic of outmoded pedagogical methods and a wise innovator,” says Vice Provost for Faculty Affairs E. Frances White. Dean Richard Revesz observed that “there are few educators in the country who have thought as deeply or as imaginatively as Peggy about how to bridge the gap between theory and practice,” adding that “her influence is felt by every student trained at the Law School, directly or indirectly. She also provides tireless mentoring and guidance to our lawyering faculty, helping to prepare them for teaching positions at law schools around the nation. Peggy’s impact as a teacher and scholar is profound.”

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Born in Poland in 1930, Meron lost six years of his childhood to ghettos and work camps, and most of his family to the Holocaust. He emerged from World War II hungry for learning. Later, he became determined to apply his legal studies at Hebrew University, Harvard Law School and Cambridge University to “working in areas which could contribute to making atrocities impossible and avoiding the horrible chaos, the helplessness, and the loss of autonomy which I remembered so well.”

Despite the humble tone of his lecture, Meron has made immense contributions—during 20 years as the legal adviser for the Israeli Foreign Service, four years as Israel’s ambassador to Canada, a year in the U.S. State Department as a counselor on international law, two years as president of the U.N. International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia and, since 2001, as appeals judge to the Tribunal. As a judge, Meron has felt privileged to write what he calls the “most exciting literature of all,” the jurisprudence of international criminal law in the “seminal Srebrenica case of General Krstic, for instance, which established that genocide can be committed even in a circumscribed geographical area.”

In introducing Meron, ACLS President Pauline Yu emphasized his “sustained effort to move beyond boundaries—both those of nations and of disciplines—to bring people together to explore common concerns and causes.” She described him as “a leading figure in the scholarship of international law but also deeply committed to its practice and development today.”

Meron attributed his success largely to “chance and seized opportunity,” but his belief that crimes against humanity can be avoided is also a factor. He cited from his 2006 book, Humanization of International Law: “It seemed to me obvious that repression of human dignity occurs in a continuum of situations of strife, ranging from normality to full blown international wars, and that all these norms must be treated as a whole to provide for a maximum of protection to human beings.”

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