“This is recognition of the highest order,” noted Barry Friedman, vice dean and Jacob D. Fuchsberg Professor of Law.

Frye first became interested in the 1939 Miller case, the Court’s last Second Amendment case, while doing research for Inez Milholland Professor of Civil Liberties Professor Burt Neuborne. “I realized that people had not done a lot of primary source research” on it, says Frye, who is now a Sullivan & Cromwell associate.

After graduating, Frye slotted his Miller case research into time left over from his federal and state court clerkships. “I was fortunate that NYU has a really fantastic legal history subdepartment, with professors like Bill Nelson and John Reid and Daniel Hulsebosch, all of whom were incredibly helpful,” says Frye.

In Justice Scalia’s opinion, he cited Frye’s article, saying that Justice John Paul Stevens’s dissent was incorrect in relying upon Miller because Miller “did not even purport to be a thorough examination of the Second Amendment.” Now Frye is working on his next article; combining his passion for law with his long-time fascination with film, it will describe how an avant-garde film affected Abe Fortas’s nomination for Chief Justice. “I just hope I can continue to produce scholarship that people find useful,” he says.

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Pildes was also elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, which “honors…remarkable men and women who have made preeminent contributions to their fields,” said Academy President Emilio Bizzi. Other inductees included Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens and former White House Chief of Staff James A. Baker III.

Dean Richard Revesz, Lawrence King Professor of Law, has joined the Council on Foreign Relations, a nonpartisan think tank that analyzes policy choices facing the U.S. and other countries. Associate Professor Cristina Rodríguez also joined the council as a five-year term member.

The National Science Foundation awarded a two-year, $387,000 grant to Stephen Schulhofer, Robert B. McKay Professor of Law; University Professor Tom Tyler, and Aziz Huq, adjunct professor of law and deputy director of the Brennan Center’s Justice Program. The grant will fund a study of how investigative tactics of Western counterterrorism agencies affect levels of trust and cooperation within Muslim communities in New York City and London.

To thwart future attacks, the FBI and the New York City Police Department have used random subway searches, immigrant detention, electronic surveillance and undercover informants; London’s Metropolitan Police Service emphasizes dialogue with Muslims. Over a year-long period, Brooklyn and East London Muslims will be interviewed, and their responses analyzed, to reveal attitudes toward their respective law enforcement authorities. A final report is expected in 2010.

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Nagel goes further than most thinkers, says Lars Bergström, a professor at Stockholm University and chair of the selection committee: “When objective and subjective perspectives conflict, it is a common move in philosophy… to subordinate or reduce one to the other. But Nagel…argues that both…perspectives must be taken seriously.”

Of Nagel’s latest honor, Ronald Dworkin, the Frank Henry Sommer Professor of Law, adds, “The Schock Prize is the hall of fame of contemporary philosophy. The past winners are the great philosophers of the age, and Tom’s election to join the list does great honor to him—and to them.”

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“This is a big deal,” Deborah Ellis ’82, assistant dean for public interest law, told the New York Law Journal in May. “The cost of tuition keeps going up and up, but the salaries of public interest lawyers don’t go up that much.”

Founded in 1951, the program is named for alumni Elihu Root (Class of 1867), the statesman, New York Governor Samuel Tilden (Class of 1841), and Jerome H. Kern ’60, chairman of the Coloradobased Symphony Media Systems. It provides need-blind, tuition scholarships to gifted students committed to public service careers and has been a model for other public service scholarships, including the newly established Gates Public Service Law Scholarship at the University of Washington. But as earnings on the endowment principal did not meet rising costs, both the number and the amount of the scholarships had been cut.

However, thanks to a 50th anniversary fundraising drive kickstarted by a $7.5 million gift from Kern, himself a “Root,” every new incoming class of “Roots” now will enjoy a full three-year ride. The RTK program awards 20 full scholarships each year. The new graduates have positions ranging from death penalty work in Alabama to counseling at-risk youth in New York City.

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As the U.N. Human Rights Council Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, Alston assessed whether due-process guarantees were being honored in death penalty cases in the U.S. After meeting with officials from the Departments of State, Justice, Defense and Homeland Security, Alston—a director of the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice—called for immediate reform. “There needs to be full accountability,” he said at a June press conference.

Six Guantánamo prisoners have been charged with capital offenses under what Alston called the “deeply flawed” Military Commissions Act of 2006. Alston said access to counsel is severely limited, and hearsay evidence is permissible. At least one of the six was subjected to waterboarding, yet coerced statements are admissible. “These trials should be aborted,” he said.

Alston also had harsh words for Texas, with the highest number of U.S. executions and death-row prisoners, and Alabama, with the highest per-capita rate of U.S. executions. He said the fact that 129 death-row inmates have been exonerated should be “an enormous wakeup call,” and he recommended repealing an Alabama law that allows judges unrestricted authority to override jury verdicts. “It’s possible that Alabama has already executed innocent people,” said Alston, “but officials would rather deny that than confront flaws in the criminal justice system.”

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A hard worker, to be sure, Thompson nonetheless credits her success in large part to the 10-year-old scholarship program, which pays full tuition to exceptional students who are from economically disadvantaged circumstances and are the first in their family to pursue a graduate degree.

“I had a hard time growing up. I had to overcome a lot to get here,” says Thompson, who was very much on her own growing up near Seattle. After a high school counselor “showed me that education was the way out,” she says, she attended Stanford University, earning a B.A. in sociology. Graduating in 1997, she held positions in marketing and finance before turning to law.

When she got to NYU, Thompson couldn’t afford a computer and intended to go without, until Anthony ’77 and Beatrice Welters, founders of the AnBryce Foundation, stepped in and bought her one. Dean Richard Revesz and several professors, including Rachel Barkow and Clayton Gillette, also gave her support. “I never saw myself as a star, but they always encouraged me. It’s hard not to believe in yourself if so many people that you respect are telling you that you can do it,” she says. “I am forever grateful.”

Thompson was the first student that Gillette, the Max E. Greenberg Professor of Contract Law, ever asked to coauthor an article (not yet published). “Leila was one of the most interesting, engaging students I have ever had the privilege to teach,” he told the school newspaper, The Commentator.

Planning to pursue corporate law after a few months of traveling, Thompson reflected on her Supreme Court stint. “You walk out and look at the building you just came from,” she says, and no matter what happens, “you feel good about yourself because it’s so amazing.”

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Dworkin, Frank Henry Sommer Professor of Law, is the first to receive the prize for legal scholarship. He was cited for having “developed an original and highly influential legal theory grounding law in morality,” and having a “unique ability” to tie abstract philosophical ideas together with “concrete everyday issues in law, moral philosophy and politics.”

A faculty member since 1975, Dworkin is the fourth winner of the annual award—named for the Dano-Norwegian playwright and author of the Age of Enlightenment—which is modeled on the Nobel Prize. The committee highlighted six of his books, including Law’s Empire, Life’s Dominion and Is Democracy Possible Here?

“Many people, I fear, many lawyers, think of the law as a rather mechanical discipline,” Dworkin observed, accepting the medal from His Royal Highness Crown Prince Haakon of Norway at a November 28, 2007 ceremony in Bergen, Norway. The Holberg, he said, celebrates the view that the “intellectual breadth and moral depth of the law depends upon seeing it as drawing from and contributing to all the other domains, among them philosophy and the humanities.”

Dworkin argues that the legal system should be seen as having two parts: rules set by law and principles of a moral nature. But when the law is fuzzy, he asserts, judges must interpret the law using evolving principles of justice and fairness.

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