What are the differences between law and banking other than the money?

When I was at Cravath, the culture of the firm was that a partner, no matter how senior, needed to read every document—and every word of every document. So as a partner at Cravath, you were still negotiating merger agreements. As a banker, you are not doing that kind of work; it is much more about your interpersonal skills, plotting strategy, and being out meeting with clients. I find that far more interesting. But on the downside, you travel a lot more as a banker. I’m on the road at least three days a week. And I didn’t do that as a lawyer.

So, then…J.D. or M.B.A.?

You can’t go wrong with either degree or even a combined degree. There are a lot of people in the M & A group at Morgan Stanley who have legal degrees. Getting a law degree is great training and doesn’t stop you from getting into banking—it might even help you. The business world is filled with people with law degrees. James Gorman, the CEO of Morgan Stanley, has one. Having said that, M.B.A.

What advice would you give your law school self if you could talk to him right now?

I would tell him that your career is going to take a very unpredictable path, and that you just need to focus on learning from everything you do wherever you happen to be working. And don’t think you can plan out your entire career. A lot of law students think that they can map out their careers, and you can’t.

After a recessionary lull, a lot of deals are getting done in early 2011. What’s your outlook for M & A?

The prognosis for 2011 is quite good. I’ve been fairly pessimistic about M & A the last couple of years, but going into 2011, all the signs indicate that we’re going to have a very good year. Corporations need growth, and they can’t get it organically. So one of the ways they’ll get it is through M & A. The other factor is a strong equity market. When you have a strong equity market, M & A is usually very strong. And maybe a third factor is that the equity markets are not that volatile. When you have wide swings in the equity markets, people stay away from doing deals, but that’s not the case right now.

You were at the center of the action in the credit crisis. What was the main thing you learned?

I didn’t fully appreciate how fragile financial systems can be. There were periods of time when you couldn’t get your money out of money market funds! A lot of us thought that while there are ups and downs in the stock market, the overall financial system was sound. But to see how fragile the system was—that it wouldn’t have survived without massive government intervention—was an eye-opener.

What was your favorite deal—as a lawyer or a banker?

The most exciting and unlikely deal was when Comcast took over AT&T’s cable business in a hostile bid. It was a $72 billion hostile bid for a subsidiary of AT&T. Taking over a subsidiary is tough—and complex—but we made the proposal publicly and kind of forced them to do it.

Your brother, Andy, is a successful stand-up comedian who has been on Letterman numerous times. What kinds of parents raise a comic and the global head of M & A at Morgan Stanley?

A plumber with two master’s degrees and a Quaker.

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Sixteen years later, Martin ’60 would again be indelibly touched by courageous black citizens, this time in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. Armed with a law degree that he earned as a Root-Tilden Scholar, Martin was a staff attorney in the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice. He prepared witnesses for the government’s case United States of America v. Theron C. Lynd, during which they would attest that they were denied the right to vote for failing to answer such questions as “How many bubbles in a bar of soap?”

That year, 1962, the federal government won its very first contempt conviction of a southern registrar, the cigar-chomping Lynd. It was a significant step toward passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, by which Congress outlawed discriminatory practices in voter enrollment.

A quarter-century later, Gordon was a Boston criminal court judge and overwhelmed by daily stories of senseless violence. Needing a change of scenery, he applied to attend Race and Nationality in Modern America, a seminar offered by NYU’s Humanities Department. As Martin recounts, Professor David Reimers called to ask if he’d actually come from Boston every Friday. “I told him,” says Martin, “‘So long as the shuttle is flying, I’ll be there.’”

Martin’s seminar project idea grew into his 2010 book, Count Them One by One: Black Mississippians Fighting for the Right to Vote, an account of how, after several decades, he tracked down those brave Lynd witnesses, or their descendants, and had them recall the case and the times.

The book was nominated this spring for a Silver Gavel award from the American Bar Association by retired DePauw University History Professor John Dittmer, who calls it “a masterful combination of historical memoir and scholarly research. What is particularly impressive and important is the oral history component of the book. [T]he local people are at the center of this book, where they should be.”

Now retired and an adjunct professor at New England Law, Martin went on a southern book tour this winter. In Memphis he met Reginald Houze, the 33-year-old grandson of one of Lynd’s black witnesses. A high school music director with a master’s in education from NYU’s Steinhardt School, Houze grew up in a Hattiesburg where white and black children “went to school together, played together, slept over at each others’ homes, and still know one another.” He had only a vague awareness of Hattiesburg’s past. “What a history lesson,” Houze said. “Now I know why Election Day was always important in my family.”

Indeed, it’s hard to imagine any day more significant than the one in 2008 when people could vote for Barack Obama to become the first black U.S. president. But the criminal court judge in Martin is not yet ready to celebrate. “An adolescent black male has a greater likelihood of coming under penal or probation restraint than attending a fouryear college,” he points out. “We still have a long way to go.”

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A native of Sweden, Dungel earned his bachelor of laws and an LL.M. at Gothenburg University and an additional LL.M. in international law at NYU. Colleagues say he was equally adept at writing scholarly articles and gently interviewing victims of human rights abuses. Before moving to Afghanistan in February, Joakim worked with the Special Court for Sierra Leone and in the war crimes tribunal at The Hague in respect to war crimes in Yugoslavia and Rwanda.

Dungel’s NYU Law faculty and friends remember a man who was uncommonly strong both physically and in spirit, who had a passion for peace and justice, and who knew exactly what he wanted to do with his life.

“Joakim was intrigued by human rights and the power they held to bring positive change, and he made it very clear in conversations that he wanted to go out into the world and make a difference. He certainly kept his promise, taking a succession of important jobs in the field, and finally made his way to the most difficult post of all, working for the U.N. in Afghanistan.”—Philip Alston, John Norton Pomeroy Professor of Law

“He was a very hard-working, dedicated scholar of human rights law. He was determined to extract the utmost from his academic experience at NYU. Quite apart from his studies, he was a thoroughly decent person. He was forthright and confident. And somewhat incongruously—incongruous in academics, at least—he was physically one of the strongest people I have ever met. The weight machines in the NYU gym weren’t enough for him so he would get people—me included—to lean down on the weights while he lifted them.”— Patrick Mair (LL.M. ’07)

“Joakim was so good at his job that he could have done anything, but he wanted to be the closest to the people he wanted to help. I thought he was invincible and still have difficulty realizing that he is gone.”— Céline Folsché (LL.M. ’07)

The most revealing, and now poignant, of statements is the one Dungel himself wrote in 2005 as he prepared to enter the NYU Law LL.M. program.

“Pierre Bayle said that history is ‘but a collection of continuous crimes and misfortunes of mankind.’ Sad as I am to have to agree with him, I have chosen not to stand by and watch while this history continues, because I believe people can settle their differences peacefully, rather than through violence.”

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Despite these liabilities Wyeth was in the midst of being acquired by Pfizer. So by late 2009, when the $68 billion deal had closed, Pfizer had inherited a full-blown litigation nightmare: Plaintiffs had racked up a 10-to-three record of trial wins and were clearly on a roll. With 10,000 cases still to be litigated, Pfizer, the world’s largest pharmaceutical company, had to take decisive action. The company brought in a new team that included its longtime outside counsel, Sheila Birnbaum ’65, a top products liability defense specialist who is partner and co-head of the Mass Torts and Insurance Litigation Group at New York-based Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom.

Setting her sights on defense strategy, the five-foot-two-inch Birnbaum did what she typically does in the high-stakes, bet-the-company cases she handles: She shrewdly surveyed the scope of the litigation, then proceeded to devise a game plan for stepping up settlement talks while also challenging the plaintiffs’ scientific evidence to strengthen Pfizer’s hand at trial.

By fall 2010, Pfizer had secured three straight trial wins, with juries in Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Arkansas finding that plaintiffs had failed to prove either that Prempro or Premarin had caused their breast cancer or that they had received inadequate warning of the drugs’ risks. What’s more, the federal judge overseeing multidistrict litigation proceedings in Arkansas recently barred the testimony of a few of plaintiffs’ key scientific witnesses who claimed these types of hormone-replacement therapies can cause cancer, deeming their testimonies insufficiently reliable or relevant. As a result, dozens of cases were dismissed or settled. All told, as of July Pfizer has managed to either knock out or settle some 3,300 suits, roughly a third of its caseload.

The litigation is still far from over. Yet thanks to Birnbaum’s efforts, said Pfizer in-house attorney Malini Moorthy last May, the momentum, at least for now, is no longer so heavily on the plaintiffs’ side. “I don’t want to tempt fate, but it’s fair to say the pendulum has swung,” says Moorthy. “We’ve evened up the game.”

Impressive as this turnabout has been, it is what clients expect from the 71-year-old Birnbaum, who has spent much of her career helping corporate defendants resolve their most difficult and costly litigation problems. Take Dow Corning’s leaky silicone gel breast implants, W.R. Grace’s asbestos contamination, or State Farm’s litigation involving claims arising from Hurricane Katrina. Birnbaum has played an integral role in defending and settling them all, not to mention countless other major mass torts cases involving everything from salmonella contamination to toxic spills to alleged injuries from cell phones.

Most recently, Birnbaum was tapped by U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder to serve as the special master of the revived September 11th Victim Compensation Fund. She is charged with distributing $2.8 billion to compensate Ground Zero rescue workers and New York residents who have suffered debilitating health problems in the aftermath of the World Trade Center attacks. This exceedingly difficult and public role complements the one she held between 2006 and 2009, when she successfully mediated settlements totaling $500 million for 92 of the 95 victims’ families who chose to litigate their claims instead of accepting compensation through the original 9/11 fund, administered by Kenneth Feinberg ’70.

Knowing how and when to settle headline-making cases like these have elevated Birnbaum to the pinnacle of the legal profession. She has been called a “legal genius,” a “lawyer’s lawyer,” and the undisputed “Queen of Torts.” She routinely comes in near the top (if not at the top) of the products liability defense bar in lawyer rankings by Chambers, Who’s Who, and other legal industry publications. And when the National Law Journal assembles its picks for the 100 most influential lawyers in the country, or when Fortune and Crain’s New York Business choose the most powerful national and local women business leaders, Birnbaum’s name is invariably on the list.

“On every type of serious matter, Sheila is my secret weapon,” says Eve Burton, general counsel of Hearst Corporation, a longtime client of Birnbaum’s. Even Zoe Littlepage, a lead plaintiffs’ attorney in the Prempro and Premarin litigation, says she can’t help but admire Birnbaum’s prowess as a tactician and the artful way she plots and maneuvers to advance her clients’ goals. So much so that at their first meeting Littlepage immediately went up to shake Birnbaum’s hand. “She’s a legend,” says Littlepage. “I told her, ‘I finally got to meet the master puppeteer.’”

Indeed, over more than four decades, as both a law professor and practicing attorney, Birnbaum has not only set standards and practices that helped to pioneer the practices of products liability and mass torts law. She has also blazed a path for women in the profession as a top rainmaker and longtime leader at Skadden, one of the world’s biggest law firms, with 2,000 lawyers around the globe and $2 billion–plus in annual revenue. She has even argued and won two Supreme Court cases, including State Farm Mutual Automobile Insurance Co. v. Campbell et al., a landmark 2003 defense victory in the long-running battle over punitive damages. “Pretty good for a torts lawyer,” quips Birnbaum.

Visiting Birnbaum’s office at Skadden’s 4 Times Square headquarters, one sees the usual signs of a successful senior partner and rainmaker. There is the 42nd-floor view of downtown Manhattan, including a dramatic close-up of the Empire State Building’s upper reaches. Papers and overstuffed file folders are piled on nearly every horizontal surface. On the coffee table is the odd tennis trophy amid a small village of gleaming crystal recognition and appreciation awards. Hanging on the walls, stacked on the floor, and propped up on a credenza are dozens of framed Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and legal journal newspaper articles, plus plaques and awards from women’s groups, Jewish groups, schools, and professional organizations. She has a mounted Louisville Slugger on a windowsill—a souvenir from a conference in Kentucky—along with a delightfully odd alligator sculpture with the words “Lady Litigator” painted on it. Here and there are photos, including a snapshot of Birnbaum with a beaming Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor.

Most days Birnbaum gets to this office before 8:00 a.m. and works until 7:00 p.m., then logs additional hours during nights and weekends from her homes on Manhattan’s East Side and in East Hampton. She also maintains a sometimes grueling travel schedule: In one recent monthlong stretch, Birnbaum hopscotched between London (for a critical arbitration), Philadelphia (for oral arguments in a key appeal), and Little Rock (for a crucial hearing in the Prempro multidistrict litigation proceedings) before returning to Skadden’s Manhattan offices, packing in three full days, then jumping on a plane to Phoenix, where she helped lead a Sedona Conference panel discussion on mass torts and punitive damages.

Despite her devotion to her job and her climb to the top of megafirm Skadden, Birnbaum defies the stereotype most people have of the diehard corporate lawyer. For one, although she fights to restrain punitive damages—which aligns her with Republican reform efforts—she is a reliable Democratic voter. And although she is a fierce defender of her clients, she has also earned the respect and affection of members of the plaintiffs’ bar, among them Christopher Seeger, co-founder of Seeger Weiss, who considers Birnbaum a mentor and has sought her advice on cases in which her clients were not involved. She is known as a consensus-builder as well as an excellent listener who is generous with her time and advice for younger attorneys. “She’s old-school in the way she relishes her role as a lawyer and a teacher,” says Skadden products liability partner Mark Cheffo, who adds that Birnbaum often urges him and other veteran lawyers to bring junior associates along to key depositions and hearings.

Friends and colleagues add that there’s nothing affected, showy, or self-important about her. “With Sheila, there’s no pretense and no big ego to be assuaged,” says Matthew Mallow ’67 (LL.M. ’68), a former Skadden partner and longtime friend. Indeed, although she can certainly afford to be extravagant, Birnbaum still balks at paying exorbitant prices for first-class air travel, using her frequent-flier miles to upgrade instead. This frugality harks back to Birnbaum’s childhood in a lower-middle-class section of the Bronx. Even her voice, surprisingly sweet, almost girlish, has an accent that still hints of her old neighborhood. “Like they say, you can take the girl out of the Bronx, but you can never take the Bronx out of the girl,” says Barbara Wrubel, a recently retired Skadden partner who is one of Birnbaum’s closest friends. “She really is still Sheila from the Bronx.”

The eldest of three children, Birnbaum, who was born Sheila Lubetsky, grew up in the mainly working-class, southeast section of the borough, the kind of old-style New York neighborhood where mothers yelled out apartment windows and kids spent summer days playing stickball in the streets. Birnbaum could be counted on to join in. “I was a tomboy,” she says. “I didn’t like dolls.”

Her parents, Belle and Louis Lubetsky, didn’t make much money from the small grocery store they ran in Harlem. And space in the two-bedroom apartment that Birnbaum’s family shared with her grandmother (and sometimes an aunt) was definitely tight. But Birnbaum says she never really wanted for anything and recalls a safe, carefree childhood.

Though neither of her parents had gone to college, and her Russian immigrant father hadn’t finished high school, they were big believers in the American Dream and were determined that their children would get a better education than they had. Birnbaum was a standout student at P.S. 50, and though she says she wasn’t at “the top of the top” of her classes, she apparently made a strong enough impression that when her brother Paul, who’s 10 years her junior, came along, teachers would still gush over Sheila. “They’d all say, ‘Oh, you’re Sheila Lubetsky’s brother,’” says Paul. “I’ve been following in her footsteps all my life.”

Birnbaum isn’t sure where she first got the notion that she’d like to be a lawyer. Growing up, she says her family didn’t know any attorneys, much less any women attorneys, nor does she remember reading books or seeing television shows or movies about lawyers. Yet somehow when she filled in the space for My Favorite Profession in her sixth-grade autograph book, she wrote down “lawyer.” The only explanation that Birnbaum can think of is that she might have been inspired by one of the current events discussions that a favorite teacher, Mrs. Stahl, used to lead.

There were some other early signs that she might be cut out for courtroom combat, however. Her brother Paul recounts the time when a neighborhood bully started harassing her. Birnbaum’s mother, who caught the action from the window of the family’s apartment, urged her to fight back. Birnbaum, 11 or 12 at the time, did just that. “She turned around and walloped him,” says Paul. “He never bothered our family again.”

Birnbaum majored in history with a minor in political science at Hunter College. When she took a law survey course covering torts, property, and criminal law, she says the subject instantly clicked with her and helped crystallize her elementary-school dream of being a lawyer. “It was clear to me that I wanted to go to law school,” says Birnbaum, who also participated in a mock World Court at Hunter and loved the complexity of the issues and the debating.

The problem was that women at the time weren’t supposed to go to law school or become attorneys. They were expected to get married as soon as possible, and if they had to work, being a teacher was about the only socially acceptable option. “It’s hard to imagine the pressure we were under to go into teaching,” says Birnbaum, who remembers feeling as if her only choice was to go with the flow.

Thus, a week before she graduated cum laude from Hunter in May 1960, she married Bernard Birnbaum, an accountant. And that fall she started a job teaching fourth grade at P.S. 62 in the South Bronx, several miles from where she grew up. “Everybody was going to teach, so that’s what you did,” says Birnbaum. “That’s what was expected.”

Birnbaum liked her students, but from the start it was clear that teaching fourth-graders just didn’t provide the kind of intellectual challenge she was looking for. She took night classes at Hunter, where she got an M.A. in history. But her dream of becoming a lawyer kept nagging. So late in 1962, she finally decided to quit her job. In the new year, she enrolled at New York University School of Law in a program that allowed her to finish in two and a half years by taking courses continuously, without summer breaks. She was one of just 13 women in her class of 360 students.

The very month after she matriculated, February 1963, the watershed book The Feminine Mystique, by Betty Friedan, helped ignite the feminist movement. For Birnbaum, the bestseller was an affirmation that she could really have the kind of career she knew she wanted. “It really crystallized the fact that you could be a woman and have a life,” recalls Birnbaum.

Though some men would certainly have been threatened by their wife making such a bold move, Birnbaum says her husband, who also was taking classes at Brooklyn Law School at night, was encouraging. Even so, Birnbaum says, the two were “growing apart.” Within two years after she started at NYU Law, they decided to divorce.

At NYU Law, Birnbaum excelled in her classes and developed a clear interest in litigation. She jumped at the chance to test her oral argument skills in moot court competition. It turned out to be a fortuitous move: Birnbaum and her team not only won handily, but the hypothetical case happened to focus on the then-nascent area of products liability law, in the wake of a landmark 1963 decision by the California Supreme Court in Greenman v. Yuba Power Products. That ruling set forth the doctrine of strict liability for defective products, thus making it far easier for purchasers of those goods to pursue damages regardless of whether the manufacturer was found to have been negligent or at fault. It was, as Birnbaum recalls, a whole new concept, and she and her team wound up spending the better part of a year debating the parameters of the new doctrine and trying to understand how strict liability worked.

“She was always asking questions,” says moot court teammate Gorman Reilly ’65, who also remembers her as being very organized and having a real zest for the law. “She could look below the surface and facts. In making a court presentation, she had a way of getting to the point and getting [the judges] on the panel to go along with her arguments.” He adds, “You could just see that she was really made for this.”

After graduating, Birnbaum—with the assistance of a friend who had a talent for typing—sent out close to 100 letters to law firms around the city before landing an interview and a less-than-enthusiastic job offer from Berman & Frost, a small litigation firm on William Street that handled a mix of plaintiffs and defense-side matters. “They weren’t sure they wanted me,” says Birnbaum, who recalls that the firm had never hired a woman lawyer before and made it clear in the interview that they had strong doubts about whether she was up to the job. “I remember them asking me what I would do if one of them called from court and needed me to check on a decision right away,” recounts Birnbaum, who responded with the obvious answer: She’d simply go to the firm’s library and look it up. “I think they expected I would fall apart and cry,” she says with a laugh.

In making their offer, according to Birnbaum, the firm’s senior partners also informed her that, at least for starters, she’d be earning $1,000 a year less than a man in her position. Birnbaum took the job anyway. She quickly proved that she knew what she was doing. Within three months, she was making the same salary as her male counterparts, and over time she was given more and more responsibility on new matters. Some were simple personal-injury and slip-and-fall cases in which she represented plaintiffs. Others, however, happened to involve cutting-edge issues in the young but fast-growing area of products liability law, including a huge matter Birnbaum took on in the late 1960s for Syntex Corporation, a pharmaceutical company that was facing hundreds of lawsuits alleging that its oral contraceptives caused blood clots and strokes.

[SIDEBAR: An Interpreter of Maladies]

The sheer volume of suits was larger than almost any company had had to fend off before, and though no one at the time called it a mass tort, says Birnbaum, that’s what it was. She and other lawyers for Syntex’s co-defendants had to invent a new approach for managing such large-scale litigation, including setting up a national defense team and establishing ways to organize the massive discovery effort and ensure that defense filings across various jurisdictions were consistent. “We were sort of writing the rules,” says Birnbaum, who traveled all over the country attending meetings and hearings in connection with the Syntex litigation. “We were starting to create a blueprint for how these kinds of cases would be handled.”

As more and more states followed California’s lead and adopted the doctrine of strict liability, a new plaintiffs’ bar specializing in products liability matters emerged. And with consumer advocate Ralph Nader ratcheting up his campaign against defective car designs and other allegedly unsafe products, plaintiffs’ lawyers had a host of new targets. It was clear a tidal wave of large-scale litigation was coming.

Along with Syntex, Birnbaum also represented Chrysler Motor Corporation in connection with claims that the steering system on its Newport Custom sedan was defective, and she wound up taking a lead role in the car giant’s appeal in Codling v. Paglia, a seminal 1973 case that established the doctrine of strict products liability in New York State. Despite the court adopting strict liability, Birnbaum notes that the decision was actually slightly more pro-defendant than in other states. “It was the best a defendant could do given the way the law was shifting,” says Birnbaum.

While Birnbaum was making a name as an expert in products liability matters, the dean of Fordham University School of Law, Joseph McLaughlin, was seeking to add women to a virtually all-male faculty. In 1974, he made Birnbaum a surprise job offer, and she accepted. “Somehow he convinced me,” says Birnbaum, who recalls that McLaughlin played heavily on the fact that she’d be a pioneer, opening doors for women in the law.

Birnbaum’s detour into academia ultimately lasted a dozen years—first at Fordham, then at her alma mater NYU Law, where she taught from 1980 to 1986, and served a two-year stint as associate dean. Though it has been 25 years since Birnbaum left the NYU Law staff, she enthusiastically recalls how much she enjoyed the back-and-forth with her students. “I loved teaching” law students, says Birnbaum, who also appreciated the freedom to study and analyze the quickly evolving products liability landscape in a way that a busy practitioner never could.

“Sheila came and hit the ground running,” says Sylvia Law ’68, Elizabeth K. Dollard Professor of Law, Medicine, and Psychiatry, who has been on the NYU Law faculty since 1973. Indeed, Law recalls that Birnbaum not only won the instant admiration of students and colleagues, but also shared some helpful tips with Law and the handful of other women who were still a tiny minority on the faculty and sometimes struggled to get the full attention and respect of some of the male students. “She gave me some of
the best advice I ever got,” says Law, who remembers Birnbaum telling her that she was probably too nice and needed to seize control by batting down obstreperous students the very first week of class. Birnbaum says her strategy for handling students with an attitude was to make a few barbed comments or jokes at their expense. “You’re smarter than they are,” she says. “You just confront them straight on.”

One NYU Law student from that era who is deeply indebted to Birnbaum is Gregory Miao (LL.M. ’85). He was born and raised in Shanghai and was the first Chinese-trained lawyer to come to the Law School as a visiting scholar in the thaw that followed the end of China’s Cultural Revolution.

Landing in New York in fall 1983, Miao had virtually no money and no real sense of purpose or belonging at NYU Law, because as a visiting scholar he was simply auditing classes and wasn’t really connecting with students. He could have easily spent the entire year at Washington Square drifting about. Miao recalls that Birnbaum took the time to talk to him and find out how he was doing. She strongly encouraged him to improve his English, then apply for a slot in NYU’s LL.M. program. Even better, according to Miao, she also made it her mission to help him secure the funds he needed to pay for the program once he was in. “You can’t believe how wonderful that was,” says Miao, who vividly remembers the day Birnbaum called him into her office and handed him a big check. Birnbaum, by then associate dean and in charge of the LL.M. and visiting scholars programs, remembers Miao as “just an outstanding person,” and says that her efforts were all in the line of duty.

Birnbaum’s willingness to—at least in Miao’s view—go out of her way to help him led him to spend another few years in New York after he earned his LL.M. working for Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison. Then, returning in the late 1980s to China, he ended up joining Skadden Arps (entirely independently of Birnbaum), where he is currently a partner splitting time in the Shanghai, Beijing, and Hong Kong offices and leads Skadden’s mergers and acquisitions and corporate practice in China. “I am so grateful to Sheila,” says Miao. “I was so surprised that a dean would spend that kind of time with me. It really changed my life.”

Today, Birnbaum is such a fixture at Skadden Arps that it’s a little hard to imagine her anywhere else. Still, as she recalls, it was really just a chance encounter at a Fordham faculty cocktail party in 1979 that brought her to the firm. Birnbaum says she had barely heard of Skadden at the time, but she got to talking to Skadden partner and Fordham adjunct professor John Feerick at the party, and he suggested she speak with one of the firm’s name partners, Joseph Flom, about setting up a part-time practice at the firm.

Skadden was in full growth mode at the time and actively looking to add new practice groups. Firm leaders believed Birnbaum’s expertise in products liability would be a smart fit. “For us, it was a no-brainer,” recalls former Skadden partner Stephen Axinn. He and other Skadden veterans, including Irene Sullivan, who would become one of the first woman partners, contend that gender was never much of an obstacle at Skadden, which has always prided itself on its entrepreneurial, egalitarian culture. “It was very much a meritocracy,” says Sullivan. “If Joe [Flom] believed you were talented, and you worked hard, that’s what mattered.”

Birnbaum says she had originally conceived of her work for Skadden as a “nice little side job.” Almost as soon as she joined the firm as counsel, however, clients with major products liability exposure began calling. Birnbaum’s practice, which included both products liability defense and insurance coverage matters, took off.

It wasn’t just the volume of new cases. The sheer size of the litigation was also increasing exponentially, with thousands upon thousands of plaintiffs now claiming injuries—a development that, as Birnbaum points out, was spurred by the rise of computers, which made it possible for the plaintiffs’ bar to instantly replicate filings. “Without computers you couldn’t have mass torts or class actions,” says Birnbaum. “There’d be just no way to do it.”

Birnbaum began hiring new lawyers to help her keep up with all the work. By the early 1980s, however, Birnbaum was spending so many long nights and weekends at Skadden that she decided it was time to leave NYU Law and join the firm as a full-time partner. In the months and years that followed, Birnbaum’s workload only got larger. In 1984, Dow Corning enlisted her help fending off what eventually mushroomed into more than 40,000 suits by women who claimed that the company’s silicone gel breast implants caused a range of serious autoimmune diseases. During the 1980s, she also defended Olin Corporation in thousands of suits involving DDT, as well as Georgia-Pacific in a mammoth class action in Louisiana alleging the company had contaminated the local water supply in 1981. Plus, she served as lead defense counsel on more than 100,000 asbestos-related lawsuits against insurance giant Metropolitan Life.

And that’s just a sampling. Indeed, as the numbers of large-scale class actions, products liability, and toxic torts cases continued to explode, Birnbaum became the go-to defense lawyer a long list of Fortune 500 companies. “Sheila was really ahead of the curve,” says Samuel Issacharoff, Bonnie and Richard Reiss Professor of Constitutional Law, an expert in complex litigation who faced Birnbaum in a water contamination case against BP, Chevron, and other oil giants involving the gasoline additive MTBE. In the early wave of products liability cases, Issacharoff notes, many companies would hire individual lawyers to litigate each matter separately. But Birnbaum understood that the flood of products liability litigation would make that strategy untenable. She built a practice around the idea of providing comprehensive representation to defendants with the aim of global resolution of their liabilities, says Issacharoff: “She anticipated where the law would require a whole different kind of representation.”

As co-head of Skadden’s Mass Torts and Insurance Litigation Group, Birnbaum oversees about 60 lawyers. She views her role as a big-picture strategist—assessing the present and future scope of the litigation, weighing the risks, and figuring out the best way to proceed to limit her clients’ exposure. “I’m always looking at what the endgame is,” says Birnbaum, who notes that it’s exceedingly rare for the defense to find a silver bullet that can suddenly make the thousands of cases in a mass torts litigation go away.

Allies and adversaries alike contend that one of her greatest talents lies in devising creative ways to resolve even the most massive, complicated matters. “A lot of defense lawyers have drunk the Kool- Aid—all they want to do is litigate,” says plaintiffs’ attorney Perry Weitz, co-founder of Weitz & Luxenberg. In the vast majority of mass torts and class actions, Birnbaum contends, the most cost-effective course of action for clients is to settle. The key question is when and for how much, she says: “You have to ask how you are going to win the most battles and skirmishes along the way so you get to the point where the litigation can be settled for the least amount of money.”

It is during those battles and skirmishes that Birnbaum demonstrates her strength and leadership. She is calm and even-tempered under pressure, even when she’s marshaling Skadden associates to meet deadlines on critical motions. “She’s our Rock of Gibraltar,” says David Zornow, global head of Skadden’s Litigation and Controversy practices. And she has a firm hand in defusing volatile situations. During settlement talks for thousands of toxic injury cases against the maker of the diet drug Dexatrim, Christopher Seeger recalls that one of his fellow plaintiffs’ attorneys jumped out of his chair and began yelling expletives in Birnbaum’s face. He says Birnbaum stuck her finger in the lawyer’s chest, said a few choice words, and put him right back into his chair. Seeger, who has had his own share of heated moments with Birnbaum over the years, contends that “if you push her too hard, the Bronx is going to come out.”

Seeger and other plaintiffs’ attorneys say, however, that Birnbaum is almost always pleasant to deal with, listening and respecting their positions. When the time comes to close settlement talks, Birnbaum is pragmatic and flexible, they say, and when she makes a promise during negotiations, she delivers. “When she gives you her word, you can count on it,” says Weitz, who has faced Birnbaum across the bargaining table in at least a dozen cases. “She’s shown she’s someone the plaintiffs’ side can trust.”

Over the years, some of Birnbaum’s pro-plaintiffs friends and colleagues on the NYU Law faculty have ribbed her about the merits of helping polluters, manufacturers of drugs, and the many other corporate defendants she represents to get off easy. “I tell her she’s a running dog for corporate America,” says University Professor Arthur Miller with a chuckle. To which, he says, Birnbaum can be counted on to retort that he’s “a supporter of extortionist” plaintiffs’ lawyers. Likewise, Sylvia Law recalls debating Birnbaum about whether helping to block plaintiffs who might have suffered real injuries from collecting damages is a worthy endeavor. “I thought that corporations should be held accountable,” says Law, while Birnbaum was sympathetic to the defendants.

Those sorts of debates haven’t done much to change the way Birnbaum regards her work. She maintains that she, too, firmly believes that corporations should not be let off the hook for willful misconduct. If, say, a drug company hid studies from the Food and Drug Administration showing a medication was harmful, then that company should be punished, says Birnbaum. The problem is that the facts on the whole in the vast majority of drug injury cases and many other types of toxic torts litigation are never that simple. She contends pieces of the story often get distorted and are used to malign corporate defendants. “It’s very easy to take an e-mail or document out of context to create passion and prejudice against a big corporation” and win a huge award, says Birnbaum. “But maybe you’re taking money from corporate shareholders and workers.”

Birnbaum says she is moved by the plight of many of the plaintiffs whose cases she defends, such as the women with advanced breast cancer in the Prempro and Premarin litigation. Still, as tragic as those women’s stories are, she insists that there’s just no proof that the two hormone-replacement drugs caused their illness. “No one knows what causes breast cancer,” says Birnbaum. “No doctor can tell a jury that the mere fact that a plaintiff took a particular drug caused their individual injuries.”

The Dow Corning case serves as a cautionary tale that helps to explain how Birnbaum can see past the swirling emotional drama of plaintiffs’ stories and insist on scientific proof of causation. Despite the tremendous hype in the 1980s and ’90s about the debilitating health issues the silicone gel breast implants allegedly caused, in the end the independent panel of scientific experts who examined the evidence found there was no credible proof linking the implants to the alleged injuries. “We knew the science [the plaintiffs were relying on] was very weak,” says Birnbaum, who helped lead the push for an independent review of the scientific evidence. “It was a decisive win for defendants.” Unfortunately for the company, by the time the review was completed Dow Corning had already declared bankruptcy and opted to settle the litigation.

And don’t even try to argue the merits of large punitive damages. While she supports the jury process, Birnbaum says large punitive damages are emotionally driven, and therefore frequently reduced by judges. She is proud of her Supreme Court win on behalf of State Farm in the 2003 Campbell case, which challenged a $145 million punitive damages verdict that State Farm had been hit with in Utah for bad faith in settling a case. Birnbaum argued that the size of the award was so excessive compared to compensatory damages that it violated State Farm’s due process rights under the 14th Amendment. She asserted that since civil defendants have fewer rights than criminal ones, grossly excessive or arbitrary punishment is unjust. A majority of the justices agreed and proceeded to lay down new guidelines on “reasonableness” for lower courts to consider when reviewing punitive damage awards. “Birnbaum argued quite forcefully that a punitive award must be limited to the rights violation suffered by the plaintiff,” says Mark Geistfeld, an expert in punitive damages who became the Sheila Lubetsky Birnbaum Professor of Civil Litigation in 2009. “Campbell has largely reoriented the hugely important tort practice of punitive damages away from the punishment of social wrongdoing to the redress of the individual issue in the tort claim.”

Birnbaum says the Court’s decision has clearly had a positive impact in making punitive damage awards more rational and predictable, in addition to reducing their size. And she contends that the net effect is actually pro-consumer. “When you punish a corporation [with a huge award], consumers often end up paying for it with higher prices,” says Birnbaum. In fact, she says, it’s simply a windfall for plaintiffs and their lawyers.

How a lawyer whose victory in Campbell was called “a big win for corporate America” by the Washington Post is not a Republican boils down to being, at heart, a hometown girl.

Growing up in the Democratic bastion of the Bronx, Birnbaum says, she never knew any Republicans. And though she officially labels herself an independent, she says that she almost invariably supports Democrats. During the 2008 presidential campaign, she was an enthusiastic donor to Hillary Clinton and went to Philadelphia on the day of the Pennsylvania primary to assist in the Clinton campaign’s get-out-the-vote effort. “I really wanted to see the first woman president,” says Birnbaum.

Over dinner with good friends, Birnbaum is always up for a lively debate about the latest political issues. “She loves to argue about politics,” says her friend Barbara Wrubel, who describes Birnbaum as liberal on social issues but a fiscal conservative.

Birnbaum, for her part, does say she’s strongly pro-choice, but she declines to get into her views on other hot-button issues for public consumption—especially in light of her recent appointment to oversee the 9/11 fund.

In her free time, Birnbaum can usually be found at her East Hampton home. Besides being an enthusiastic Scrabble player, she took up golf seven years ago. And all her corporate travel hasn’t dimmed her wanderlust or sense of adventure. She is an avid kayaker and outdoor enthusiast. This year she toured northern India and went snowshoeing in Aspen. “It’s just a beautiful thing to get out in the woods with the snow falling,” says Birnbaum.

She has also recently started cooking Italian food—thanks to Brooklyn Law School President Joan Wexler (and former NYU Law professor) and other longtime friends, who gave Birnbaum lessons with a private chef for her 71st birthday this past March. “We’re hoping she gets back into cooking,” says Wexler, who adds that in the past Birnbaum has hosted some great dinner parties, in addition to the party she throws in East Hampton every summer, when she treats a group of about 30 friends to an outdoor meal on the night of an annual town fireworks show.

Despite Birnbaum’s frenetic work schedule, Wexler and others say she’s exceptionally giving of her time and is the kind of friend who can be counted on whenever they’re in need. “We all know that Sheila will be there for us,” says Madeline Stoller, who says that when one of Stoller’s family members was ill, Birnbaum called her every day and offered helpful, practical advice.

Likewise, years back, when Stoller flew back to New York from Florida after her mother died, she says Birnbaum came to LaGuardia to pick her up at 11:00 p.m. “She’s the most supportive friend in every way possible,” says Stoller, who met Birnbaum when the two shared a summer home in the Hamptons roughly 40 years ago and credits Birnbaum with urging her to go to law school. Now retired, Stoller was in-house counsel at Wyeth Pharmaceuticals until 2006.

During Birnbaum’s early 40s, there was a period when she thought she might like to have children. That time came and went, but Birnbaum says she has no regrets. “I wouldn’t have been able to accomplish all I’ve accomplished,” she says, noting that she has three nieces whom she’s close to, including one—Sara, her brother Paul’s daughter—who graduated magna cum laude this spring from NYU’s College of Arts and Science.

Looking back at her many achievements, Birnbaum says she feels best about her ability to show that a woman could build a leading practice with top-tier clients and practice law at the very highest level. She’s also proud of the many things she has done to support other women lawyers, including serving as a mentor and helping to organize an annual Skadden women’s retreat, where the firm’s female partners can network with top clients. “I’ve always tried to open doors for other women,” says Birnbaum, who was also involved in the creation of the Women’s Bar Association of the State of New York.

For now, Birnbaum insists she’s still enjoying her practice at Skadden too much to think about retiring. “I love practicing law, and I intend to keep practicing as long as I can,” she says. You don’t need scientific evidence to conclude that’s a sound decision.

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In August 2009, Tyree traded her Bedford-Stuyvesant apartment for a house in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. And she has joined activists and residents in protesting detrimental coal mining practices as the environmental justice coordinator at the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition (OVEC), a West Virginia–based grassroots advocacy organization.

Tyree’s work is divided between fighting mountaintop removal, in which explosives are used to blast off as much as 500 feet from the top of a mountain to expose its coal seam, and coordinating the Sludge Safety Project, which educates the community about the potential hazards of slurry or sludge—the wastewater that results from washing coal. The coal industry “will tell you up and down that slurry is safe, that it doesn’t travel into people’s groundwater,” Tyree says. But when some people turn on the tap, she asserts, their water “comes out black with lumps of coal.”

The only employee at OVEC to hold a law degree, she helps residents file lawsuits and deal with permits, assists in drafting proposed legislation, and educates community members about their rights. Making house calls to taste residents’ water and hear their complaints, Tyree “never uses a notepad,” says resident Maria Lambert. “She just listens and has a way of leading people into conversation so that they can figure solutions out on their own.”

Because of Tyree’s persistence, politicians were moved to invite West Virginia coal industry leaders and local residents to a meeting about a bill she helped draft that proposed alternative means of processing coal. In the end, the state legislature defeated the bill. “But as a result of that meeting,” says Dianne Bady, co-director of OVEC, “we’ve educated the legislature and gotten a lot more publicity, so in the future we may likely get the bill passed.”

Tyree and coal industry leaders generally don’t see eye to eye. Jason Bostic, vice president of the West Virginia Coal Association, says there are certain issues on which he and Tyree “respectfully agree to disagree.” He insists that the only chemicals found in coal slurry are minerals that occur naturally in West Virginia’s soil. And he asserts that the industry is highly regulated, its mines frequently inspected. But he calms down when talking about Tyree. “We fight like cats and dogs on a particular issue but can walk out of the state capitol and have a decent, tame, civilized conversation,” he says. “Stephanie is a class act.”

During the meeting about the draft bill, Bostic admits that he lost his temper at Tyree. But Tyree remained on point and did not back down. “She handled it gracefully without giving an inch of ground,” says Mat Louis-Rosenberg, an activist with Coal River Mountain Watch in West Virginia, who was also in attendance. “After the session, he apologized.”

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Conley died last September at age 89. Before his death, he had made provisions for a $1.2 million gift to his alma mater that will endow the Honorable Charles Swinger Conley Scholarship Fund and will also fund a permanent memorial at the Law School honoring Conley’s outstanding legal accomplishments and historic career.

Conley’s law office on Bainbridge Street—walking distance from King’s Dexter Avenue Baptist Church—was informally known as Executive House. During the 1960s, it was a center of social activism in a city that was itself ground zero for the civil rights movement. Conley’s strategic counsel was sought by the likes of Rosa Parks, leader of the Montgomery bus boycott; King, Abernathy, and other members of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference; and fellow crusading lawyers Virginia Foster Durr and Fred Gray.

Upstairs at Executive House, Conley maintained overnight accommodations—full bar included—for out-of-town activists and visiting counsel such as New Yorkers William Kunstler and Arthur Kinoy.

Conley was engaged in a full-scale battle for civil rights. In Cobb v. Montgomery Library Board (1962), for example, Conley’s pro bono client was a black child denied use of the city’s main library. When Conley prevailed and the U.S. District Court in Montgomery ordered the library desegregated, officials removed all the visitor chairs from the library. No patron, black or white, could sit. “Well, that was just pure spite,” says Conley’s widow, Ellen, “but it didn’t last long.” In one of Conley’s most significant victories, Seals v. Wiman, also in 1962, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in New Orleans overturned the conviction of Conley’s client, Willie Seals, a young black man found guilty of raping a white woman in 1958 by an allwhite jury and sentenced to Alabama’s death row. The court held that exclusion of blacks from Alabama’s jury rolls violated the 14th Amendment.

Conley also played a part in the landmark 1964 Supreme Court case New York Times Co. v. Sullivan. He represented four ministers, including Abernathy, as coplaintiffs with the Times, contributing to briefs in a case that ultimately established an “actual malice” standard had to be met before news accounts about public officials could be deemed libelous. The ruling allowed unfettered coverage of civil rights demonstrations then taking place throughout the South.

Ellen Conley was her husband’s chauffeur and protector in the turbulent ’60s, especially when he worked at his office late into the night. “I’d always insist on getting out of the car first,” she said in a telephone interview. “If a bullet was coming, it would get me. Chuck had important work to finish.”

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“I had one main goal: I wanted to work in public policy on child welfare and poverty issues,” said the Law Women’s 2011 Alumna of the Year in an interview before she accepted the award. The international arena wasn’t part of that plan. But after serving as a summer intern at the State Department, she was offered a spot as an attorney/adviser in the Office of the Legal Adviser at the U.S. Department of State a year out of law school. “She was a self-described U.S. policy wonk,” says her NYU Law roommate Carrie Syme ’00. “So ending up in the State Department surprised her a little bit. But I think she quickly realized that it’s all part of the same commitment to public service.”

Sanford started on Monday, September 10, 2001, expecting her job responsibilities to be a mixture of management and regulatory work, such as dealing with what allowances foreign-service officers are legally eligible for. “The first day was pretty quiet,” she told the audience at the award reception. “It got considerably busier.”

When the second plane hit the tower, Sanford remembers, she was getting her badge. The nature of her job changed instantly. During the year that followed, she spent a majority of her time coordinating embassy evacuations. Since then she has helped establish the Office of the U.S. Global AIDS Coordinator, worked on the State Department’s 9/11 task force, advised the newly appointed government in Baghdad in 2004 through the transition to the nation’s first democratically elected government, and most recently helped Sudan figure out how to handle the upcoming secession of southern Sudan. “It’s not your typical legal job,” she admits candidly. “But I can’t think of a better job or one that has given me more opportunities.”

The chances she has had would make a wistful globetrotter green with envy. In the first six months on the job, she traveled to New Delhi to help with evacuations at the embassy there and has since been to Ethiopia, Chad, Kenya, Iraq, and the Sudan, among other countries. Not bad for someone who grew up just outside of San Francisco, went to college in Arizona, and hadn’t ever applied for a passport. “Before I started at the State Department, I had never gone anywhere that required one,” she says.

Mindful of her responsibility to be discreet, Sanford, now 37, says that she has been able to have an impact on world events and how they unfold. “Watching things happen that you know you have contributed to—knowing that you’ve helped—is incredibly exciting and rewarding,” she says. She also loves the constantly changing nature of her job. State’s legal office moves the 170 attorneys in the department around every few years—and for Sanford that’s a good thing. “I may sound a bit like Pollyanna. But what I like most about this job is that I get to change jobs on a regular basis,” she says with a warm smile, tucking her long brown hair behind her ear. “We get to work on lots of different issues, and that lets you continue learning. It never goes stale.”

Not everything is always rosy, of course. Sanford had to live in a war zone in Iraq for a year, for example, where she rarely, if ever, ventured outside without a military escort. And she says the seeming paralysis caused by consensus-based decision making frustrates her. Nevertheless, Sanford considers herself lucky. “When I go to work, I deal with issues of law like how the Sudanese will be able to divide the wealth in the country between its two halves when the south secedes,” she says. “It’s human interest.”

And after all, helping people is pretty much what Sanford’s original goal boils down to. “Be prepared,” says the recipient of the 2006 Call to Service Medal awarded by the Partnership for Public Service, offering advice to today’s law students. “You could end up doing something completely different than you expect. But don’t close yourself off from the opportunity.” You very well might end up where you wanted to be after all.

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“An Illustrated Guide to Wilf Hall”

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Brown’s solution was to help create the hard-hitting “Close Guantánamo” campaign. Amnesty unfurled the effort in 2008 to capitalize on the presidential race. The cornerstone of the initiative was putting a 10-by-6-foot Guantánamo cell on tour across the United States, inviting passersby to enter. In some cases, volunteers were asked to assume the stress positions detainees had been subjected to. “People were saying, ‘Wow, this hurts,’” says Brown. “And we were like, ‘That’s the point.’” Public sentiment shifted. One of President Obama’s first official acts was to sign an executive order to close Guantánamo. Although it remains open, conditions have reportedly improved.

In her 14 years as a human rights advocate, Brown has learned how to strategically rabble-rouse to get things done. That willingness to act sets her apart from other policy directors, who traditionally produce reports. “A lot of rights activists come from an academic research background,” says Joseph Saunders ’93, deputy program director at Human Rights Watch, where Brown worked for nine years before moving to Amnesty in 2006. “Widney’s instincts have long been those of an advocate, and that’s one reason why she doesn’t just focus on researching reports but keeps her eye on the broader issue—namely, figuring out how we can actually change policies to improve lives.”

Indeed, one of the hallmarks of Brown’s career has been trying to stretch the human rights agenda so that it addresses the challenges that make life for the most vulnerable so difficult. “People in many parts of the world,” she says, “live daily with fear and want, and as a human rights organization we need to address both issues.” Officially, her portfolio at Amnesty covers issues that cross transnational boundaries; she’s responsible for everything from refugee and immigrant rights to advocacy before international bodies such as the United Nations. But Brown sees her mandate—and Amnesty’s— more expansively. To her, issues like access to basic health care and food security are part of the human rights community’s bailiwick.

That conviction stems in part from her international travels. As she visited places ranging from Saudi Arabia to Uganda, Brown was struck by the fact that the most marginalized citizens were suffering from a lack of services such as potable water and consistent electricity, and governments were unable, or unwilling, to provide the infrastructure to deliver them. On her own time, she convened a group of civil engineers in London to discuss how they could tap technology to improve conditions in the most deprived regions of the earth. “The idea,” she explains, “is to find something like the cell phone that’s done more to improve the lives of the world’s poor than any other modern invention.” Members of the group are now attempting to raise money from the corporate engineering private sector to pay to dispatch an Iraqi engineer to install solar panels in his native country, with an eye toward providing sustainable electricity to communities there.

Brown decided to attend law school 13 years after graduating from George Washington University because she knew a J.D. could provide the entry to the human rights work she coveted. In 1997, after representing gay victims of hate crimes in New York City for three years, Brown joined Human Rights Watch. There, she started authoring reports on human rights abuses, and her work quickly garnered attention. “Hatred in the Hallways”—an investigation into the harassment of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender youth in U.S. high schools— has been cited by multiple U.S. courts since its publication in 2001.

Now that she does more conceptualizing rather than writing of reports, Brown has made a point of coaching junior colleagues in how to showcase their research. When Esther Major, a researcher in the Central America division at Amnesty, presented arguments against Nicaragua’s total ban on abortion at the U.N.’s Committee Against Torture, Brown guided her through every step of the process. “She was permanently on the phone with me,” says Major. The researcher succeeded in convincing the committee to issue a “strong recommendation” in 2009 that Nicaragua reconsider its abortion policy.

Brown emphasizes the importance of matching the technique of persuasion to the target Amnesty is trying to sway. As “Close Guantánamo” proved, she doesn’t shy away from confrontation, but she is also a believer in subtle persuasion—something she says she learned at the NYU School of Law.

In 1992, Colorado passed a constitutional amendment that excluded gays and lesbians from antidiscrimination laws in the state. Brown and Glenn Greenwald ’94, now a blogger at Salon, responded by urging the Law School to boycott Colorado. The pair met with individual members of the faculty to encourage them to sign on. Brown says she “learned not to ask up front if someone was going to vote our way” but to begin by making her case instead. “You need to give people room to change their minds.” A majority of faculty agreed to boycott conferences in that state, which admittedly was more a statement than an economic blow. And four years later the Supreme Court struck down the amendment, in Romer v. Evans. Brown now credits those hours in faculty offices with teaching her the skills she uses today to coax foreign ministers and U.S. policymakers to support a human rights agenda. “It was,” says Brown, “the best training for what I do now.”

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