The American Law Institute has elected HLS Professors Kenneth Mack ‘91 and William Rubenstein ’86 as members.
The leading independent organization in the United States producing scholarly work to clarify, modernize, and improve the law, the ALI drafts, discusses, revises, and publishes Restatements of the Law, Model Codes, and Principles of Law that are influential in the courts and legislatures, as well as in legal scholarship and education.
Mack and Rubenstein were two of 45 people elected to the ALI this year. Five HLS graduates—Chris Altenbernd ’75, shareholder at Carlton Fields Jordan Burt, and former judge on Florida’s Second District Court of Appeals; Neal Berinhout ’86, vice president and associate general counsel for AT&T Services; Sherman Clark ’92, professor at the University of Michigan Law School; John Levi ’72 LL.M. ’73, partner at Sidley Austin; and Kathleen Sullivan ‘81, partner at Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan and former dean of Stanford Law School—were also elected.
Mack is the inaugural Lawrence D. Biele Professor of Law and affiliate professor of
History at Harvard University and is the co-faculty leader of the Harvard Law School Program on Law and History. During the 2015-16 year, he served as co-faculty leader of the Workshop on the History of Capitalism in the Americas at the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American history.
His research and teaching have focused on American legal and constitutional history with particular emphasis on race relations, politics and economic life. His 2012 book, “Representing the Race: The Creation of the Civil Rights Lawyer” (Harvard University Press), was selected as a Top 50 Non-fiction Book of the Year by the Washington Post, was a National Book Festival selection, was awarded honorable mention for the J. Willard Hurst Award by the Law and Society Association, and was a finalist for the Julia Ward Howe Book Award. He is also the co-editor of “The New Black: What Has Changed—And What Has Not—With Race in America” (New Press, 2013). His articles have been published in a wide variety of scholarly and general interest publications. He is currently working on a book that examines the social and political history of race and political economy in the United States after 1975.
Rubenstein, who in the past was an advisor on an ALI project about aggregate litigation, is the Sidley Austin Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, where he teaches and writes primarily about complex litigation. He is the author, co-author, or editor of four books and more than a dozen scholarly articles, as well as dozens of shorter publications, most of which concern complex litigation. Since 2008, Rubenstein has been the sole author of “Newberg on Class Actions” and he is in the process of re-writing the entire 11-volume treatise for its fifth edition.
Rubenstein was a staff attorney with the ACLU’s National LGBT and AIDS Projects from 1987-1990 and director of those projects from 1990-1995. In those capacities, he litigated civil rights cases in state and federal courts throughout the country and oversaw the ACLU’s national litigation strategy on these issues. Rubenstein argued the landmark case, Braschi v. Stahl Associates, 544 N.E.2d 49 (N.Y. 1989), before New York’s highest court, yielding the first decision in the United States recognizing a gay couple as a legal family. He is author of the first law school casebook on sexual orientation and AIDS law, now entitled “Cases and Materials on Sexual Orientation and The Law” (now with Carlos Ball and Jane Schacter, 4th ed. 2011). Rubenstein was awarded the 2011-2012 Albert M. Sacks-Paul A. Freund Award for Teaching Excellence at Harvard Law School.