Letter from the Director
Robert L. Nelson, Director
The 2006-07 year has been one of remarkable accomplishment for the American Bar Foundation. ABF President David Tang convened a Planning Task Force, co-chaired by William Hubbard, to plan for the future growth of the ABF. The Task Force report was adopted by the ABF Board of Directors in May 2007. The Report endorsed the research institute model of the ABF and suggested new directions that would complement the strength of the existing research model. Among the innovations the Report will lead to are expanded doctoral fellowship and visiting scholar programs, the creation of Special Project Funds to develop projects of special interest and need to the legal profession and the system of justice, new research partnerships with other universities, and new emphases on communications and development activities.
We already have put several of these ideas into motion.
1) Expanding Doctoral Fellowship and Visiting Scholar Programs. One exciting development is that the ABF, in partnership with the Law and Society Association, has received a major grant from the National Science Foundation to fund eight doctoral fellowships over the next five years to be held in residence at the ABF. These fellowships are targeted for young scholars working in the area of law and inequality and are intended to increase the diversity of scholars engaged in research in law and social science. Special thanks are due to Research Fellow Laura Beth Nielsen, who wrote the grant proposal, and to Lauren Edelman, ABF Board member, who initially developed the concept as President of the Law and Society Association.
Funded doctoral fellowships resumed this year, with the result that four promising young scholars are doing doctoral research in residence at the ABF on such critical issues as political attacks on the judiciary, the treatment of rape as a war crime, the transformation of the legal profession in China, and the shifting character of diversity programs in the United States.
Next year we plan to initiate a funded Visiting Scholar program to add to our existing sabbatical leave program, which has brought the ABF several strong scholars in recent years.
2) Creation of the ABF-University of Illinois College of Law Center on Law and Globalization. The ABF and the University of Illinois College of Law have launched a new center under leadership from the faculty of both institutions—John Hagan and Terence Halliday from the ABF and Thomas Ginsburg and Charlotte Ku from Illinois. The Center is jointly funded for a six year period and will focus on empirical research relating to issues of health, security, and development. The Center will sponsor a series of conferences that will bring together scholars of law and globalization with leading practitioners and policymakers working in the international sphere.
3) Record breaking growth in membership and revenue for the Fellows of the American Bar Foundation. Under the leadership of Assistant Director Eileen Gallagher and the officers of the Fellows of the ABF (Ellen Rosenblum, Ellen Flannery, and Jimmy Goodman), Fellows revenue for the first time surpassed $1 million, which represents roughly a doubling of revenue since 2005. Membership in the Fellows is reserved to the top one-third of one percent of top lawyers in each state. Fellows make an annual contribution to support the research of the ABF, organize events at the state level, and participate in regional and national programs on topics in which the ABF is doing research. The new wave of success in recruiting members reflects the growing recognition of the significance of the research being done by the ABF and the commitment of leading lawyers to support such work.
4) New Research Faculty Appointments. For the first time in more than five years the ABF hired new Research Fellows to join our research faculty. They are Traci Burch, a newly minted political scientist from Harvard University, who studies the impact of incarceration on levels of political participation at the community level; and Dylan Penningroth, a pre-eminent historian on law and slavery in the U.S. and in Ghana, who has launched new research on the use of law by African-Americans in 19th century America. Burch and Penningroth are jointly appointed at Northwestern University in political science and history, respectively. Bernadette Atuahene became a new Faculty Fellow this year and will be in residence for part of the year from 2007 through 2010. Atuahene is an assistant professor of law at Chicago-Kent College of Law and is conducting research on land reform and other forms of reparation for historical wrongs in South Africa and other contexts.
5) Record level of Research Activity. Fueled by record-breaking success in obtaining external research grants, which totaled $2.1 million awarded in 2006, the ABF engaged in research activity of some $1.49 million in 2006-07, not including faculty salaries. Among the many large projects that attracted significant external grant support was Wave 2 of the After the JD study of lawyers' careers. At the time of this writing, over 3,000 young lawyers have responded to the Wave 2 survey, including more than 65% of those who were interviewed in the Wave 1 survey. Other National Science Foundation supported research by Bryant Garth, John Comaroff, Ronit Dinovitzer, John Hagan, Terence Halliday, Carol Heimer, Janice Nadler, Laura Beth Nielsen, and myself marks the ABF as a national leader in law and social science.
6) Leading the scholarship in the World Justice Project. The ABF has had the great privilege to work with President William Neukom of the ABA in providing scholarly assistance to his initiative, the World Justice Project. Nobel Laureate James Heckman, who is an ABF Research Fellow and professor of economics at the University of Chicago, is heading a steering group of scholars who are examining the relationship between the rule of law and economic, social, and political development. Heckman has recruited an extraordinary group of scholars, including Amartya Sen, another Nobel Laureate, who met in a workshop at the ABF in November 2007 and who will present papers at the World Justice Forum in Vienna in July 2008. The scholars program also encompasses an international access to justice group, led by Professor Yash Ghai, of the University of Hong Kong, and a group of political scientists led by University of Washington professor, Margaret Levi. These scholars are providing original scholarship on the conditions that lead to the rule of law and the social consequences of the rule of law in different historical and developmental contexts. They also have provided advice on the Rule of Law Index, the tool the ABA initiative is developing to encourage the strengthening of the rule of law across the globe.
7) Growing Policy Impact. ABF research has become increasingly significant to ongoing policy debates concerning law. ABF researchers regularly participate as experts and consultants on committees of the organized bar and in other forums. Austan Goolsbee and Steven Levitt are regular columnists in the New York Times. James Heckman's research on the advantages of investing in early childhood programs has been cited by numerous government officials, including former U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair and in Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi's National Summit on America's Children. John Hagan's research on the death toll in Darfur, published in Science, fundamentally redefined the international debate about that tragedy. Shari Diamond's research on juries provided important input to several jury reform efforts, including the ABA's American Jury Project. Elizabeth Mertz's new book, The Language of Law School (2007) is widely cited in a new Carnegie Foundation Report on legal education. An article by Laura Beth Nielsen and her co-author, C. R. Albiston, published in the UCLA Law Review, was frequently cited in briefs filed in the Supreme Court in a case argued last term.
These exciting new developments are just the most recent chapter in the distinguished history of the American Bar Foundation. The ABF was founded more than fifty years ago to serve the interests of justice by providing independent, objective, and rigorous research about how the law actually works. Given the growing importance of law in all aspects of our lives, from great debates about the relationship between the rule of law and economic and political progress to the quiet debates in hospital wards about who has the legal authority to make medical decisions near the end of life, objective and insightful research into how law works also has become more important. The ABF is privileged to be at the forefront of creating new knowledge about the law. Our efforts would not be possible without the legacy of support offered by the American Bar Endowment and the Fellows of the American Bar Foundation. We look forward to continuing partnerships that will build a research program to respond to the new challenges that confront law and the legal profession in the twenty-first century.
Robert L. Nelson, Director