Preet Bharara, U.S. Attorney, Southern District of New York, To Present Charles Evans Hughes Memorial Lecture on February 2 at NYCLA

 

Preet Bharara, U.S. Attorney, Southern District of New York, To Present Charles Evans Hughes Memorial Lecture on February 2 at NYCLA

 

January 26, 2010 – New York, NY – On Tuesday, February 2, Preet Bharara, United States Attorney, Southern District of New York, will present the Hughes Lecture at the 47th Charles Evans Hughes Memorial Lecture, at the New York County Lawyers’ Association (NYCLA) Home of Law, 14 Vesey Street, at 6:00 PM. A cocktail reception will follow the lecture, which is sponsored by Hughes Hubbard & Reed LLP.

 

Preet Bharara

Preet Bharara was sworn in as the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York on August 13, 2009. In that role, Mr. Bharara oversees the litigation of all criminal and civil cases brought on behalf of the United States in the District, which comprises Manhattan, Bronx, Westchester, Dutchess, Orange, Putnam, Rockland and Sullivan counties. He supervises an office of more than 450 employees, including more than 200 Assistant United States Attorneys.

 

Mr. Bharara is a member of the Attorney General’s Advisory Committee and serves as Chair of its Subcommittee on White Collar Fraud. Mr. Bharara also co-chairs the Securities and Commodities Fraud Working Group of the interagency Financial Fraud Enforcement Task Force. As U.S. Attorney, Mr. Bharara oversees numerous criminal and civil cases, including ground-breaking financial fraud and insider trading prosecutions, historic international terrorism cases and the resolution of alleged civil rights violations at various public venues. Since becoming U.S. Attorney, Mr. Bharara has formed a specialized unit in the Criminal Division dedicated to addressing the significant threats posed by large-scale sophisticated frauds and emerging cyber crimes. Previously, he served as the Chief Counsel and Staff Director of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Administrative Oversight and the Courts. During his tenure, he helped to lead the Senate Judiciary Committee investigation into the firing of U.S. Attorneys.

 

From 2000 to 2005, Mr. Bharara served as an Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Southern District of New York, where he prosecuted a wide range of cases involving organized crime, racketeering, securities fraud, money laundering, narcotics trafficking and other crimes. Mr. Bharara was a litigation associate in New York at Swidler Berlin Shereff Friedman from 1996 to 2000 and Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher from 1993 to 1996. He graduated magna cum laude from Harvard College with an A.B. in Government in 1990, and from Columbia Law School with a J.D. in 1993, where he was a member of the Columbia Law Review.

 

Charles Evans Hughes

In 1948, NYCLA established the Charles Evans Hughes Memorial Lecture series to pay tribute to Hon. Charles Evans Hughes (1862-1948), who served as NYCLA’s eighth president (1919-1921), Governor of New York (1907-1910), Associate Justice of the Supreme Court (1910-1916), U.S. Secretary of State (1921-1925) and Chief Justice of the Supreme Court (1930-1941). In 1916, he resigned from the Supreme Court to run as the Republican U.S. presidential candidate, losing one of the closest presidential elections in history to Woodrow Wilson. Hughes launched his law career before graduating from law school. In 1871, after the Great Chicago Fire killed more than 300 people, a Chicago lawyer, Walter S. Carter, had so many claims to prosecute involving insurers bankrupted by the fire that he moved his office to New York. Since he had more business than he could handle, he decided to hire the most promising law students to help him and, in a departure from standard practice, paid these “associates” a salary. One of these associates was Charles Evans Hughes. When Hughes entered the Carter law firm upon graduation from Columbia Law School in 1884, the firm’s name was Chamberlain, Carter & Hornblower. Four years later, Hughes was made partner and the name was changed to Carter, Hughes & Cravath. The firm is now known as Hughes Hubbard & Reed LLP and assumed sponsorship of the lecture series in 2007. in 2008, Hon. José A. Cabranes of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit was the Hughes lecturer.

 

The New York County Lawyers’ Association (www.nycla.org) was founded in 1908 as the first major bar association in the country that admitted members without regard to race, ethnicity, religion, gender or sexual identity. Since its inception, it has pioneered some of the most far-reaching and tangible reforms in American jurisprudence and has continuously played an active role in legal developments and public policy.