JUDGE SONIA SOTOMAYOR TO DELIVER COLUMBIA LAW SCHOOL'S 2004 GRADUATION ADDRESS
NEW YORK - Judge Sonia Sotomayor of the US Court of Appeals' Second Circuit will deliver the keynote address at the graduation ceremonies for Columbia Law School, on May 18 at Lincoln Center's Avery Fisher Hall in New York.
For the past six years, Sonia Sotomayor has been a judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. From 1992 until her recent appointment, she served as a United States District Court Judge for the Southern District of New York.
Judge Sotomayor began her legal career in 1979 as an Assistant District Attorney in New York County. In 1984 and until her first judicial appointment, she practiced with the law firm of Pavia & Harcourt as an associate and later partner. Her focus at the firm was on intellectual property issues and international litigation and arbitration of commercial and commodity export trading cases. She also served as a member of the Second Circuit Task Force on Gender, Racial and Ethnic Fairness in the Courts and was formerly on the Board of Directors of the State of New York Mortgage Agency, the New York City Campaign Finance Board, the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund and the Maternity Center Association.
Highlights of the ceremony also include the receipt of the Willis L.M. Reese Prize for excellence in teaching by Samuel Issacharoff, the Harold R. Medina Professor in Procedural Jurisprudence at Columbia University. He is one of the pioneers in the law of political process, where his Law of Democracy casebook and dozens of articles have helped to create a vibrant new area of constitutional law.
Seating is reserved for graduating Law School students and their guests. For more information, please contact Student Services at (212) 854-2395. Columbia University will hold separate commencement ceremonies on the Morningside Heights campus on May 19. Please see www.columbia.edu for more information on the University's ceremony.
Since October 7, 1998, Sonia Sotomayor has been a judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. From October 2, 1992 until her recent appointment, she served as a United States District Court Judge for the Southern District of New York.
Judge Sotomayor began her legal career in 1979 as an Assistant District Attorney in New York County. In 1984 and until her first judicial appointment, she practiced with the law firm of Pavia & Harcourt as an associate and later partner. Her focus at the firm was on intellectual property issues and international litigation and arbitration of commercial and commodity export trading cases. She also served as a member of the Second Circuit Task Force on Gender, Racial and Ethnic Fairness in the Courts and was formerly on the Board of Directors of the State of New York Mortgage Agency, the New York City Campaign Finance Board, the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund and the Maternity Center Association.
After graduating from Princeton University summa cum laude in 1976, Judge Sotomayor attended Yale Law School. At Yale, she served as an editor of the Yale Law Journal and managing editor of the Yale Studies in World Public Order. In 1999, Judge Sotomayor received an Honorary Doctor of Law Degree from Herbert H. Lehman College; in 2001 she received Honorary Doctor of Law Degrees from Princeton University and Brooklyn Law School and in 2003 she received an Honorary Doctor of Law Degree from Pace University School of Law. Judge Sotomayor is also an Adjunct Professor at New York University School of Law since 1998 and a Lecturer-in-Law at Columbia Law School since 1999.
Judge Sotomayor is a member of the American Bar Association, the New York City Chapter of the Women's Bar Association, the National Hispanic Bar Association, the Puerto Rican Bar Association and the Association of Hispanic Judges and the American Philosophical Society. Judge Sotomayor is a frequent speaker and panelist at bar conferences and law schools.
Judge Sotomayor is a native of the Bronx and is fluent in both English and Spanish.
Samuel Issacharoff is the Harold R. Medina Professor in Procedural Jurisprudence at Columbia. He began his teaching career at the University of Texas in 1989, where he held the Joseph D. Jamail Centennial Chair in Law, before moving to Columbia in 1999.
Professor Issacharoff is an established leader in an impressively diverse range of fields of law. He is one of the pioneers in the law of the political process, where his Law of Democracy casebook (co-authored with NYU's Rick Pildes and Stanford's Pam Karlan) and dozens of articles have helped to create a vibrant new area of constitutional law. He is a leading figure in the field of procedure, where he brings a vast knowledge of the fast-moving world of complex litigation together with sophisticated scholarly insights. In addition to ongoing involvement in some of the front-burner cases in this area, he now serves as the Reporter for the newly created Project on Aggregate Litigation of the American Law Institute. He was also one of the early teachers and scholars in the field of employment law, where he has regularly challenged orthodox assumptions and approaches. In each of these areas, he has brought to the law a diverse set of interdisciplinary methods from economics, psychology, political science and game theory. He was one of the first scholars to apply behavioral economics to law, and to conduct experiments to test legal assumptions about human behavior. His fifty plus published articles appear in every leading law review, as well as in leading journals in other fields. Most recently, Professor Issacharoff was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
