Warren is named ALI’s second vice president

Harvard Law School Professor Elizabeth Warren, the Leo Gottlieb Professor of Law, has been named the second vice president of the American Law Institute (ALI), a 77-year-old scholarly institution dedicated to clarifying and adapting the law to better suit society’s needs.

Warren succeeds Conrad K. Harper, the ALI’s first vice president. A ’65 graduate of Harvard Law School, Harper is also a member of the Harvard Corporation.

An authority on bankruptcy and commercial law, Warren joined the Law School faculty in 1995 and has received the prestigious Sacks and Freund Award for Teaching Excellence. She has written extensively on bankruptcy and the effects of debt on society. Warren is a co-author of “As We Forgive Our Debtors: Bankruptcy and Consumer Law in America” (Oxford University Press, 1989), which won the American Bar Association’s Silver Gavel Award and was a finalist for the award of the American Sociological Association as the best book of the year. She has also co-authored “The Fragile Middle Class” (Yale University Press, 2000) and “The Law of Debtors and Creditors” (Little, Brown, and Co., 1986).

Warren was first elected to the ALI in 1986 and joined its governing council in 1993.

Founded in 1923 and based in Philadelphia, the American Law Institute drafts and publishes restatements of the law, model codes, and other proposals for legal reform to clarify and simplify the application of the law to society. Its membership consists of judges, practicing lawyers, and legal scholars from across the United States and around the world.