CHARLES EVANS HUGHES MEMORIAL LECTURE TO BE DELIVERED BY HON. JOSE CABRANES ON NOVEMBER 18

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

CONTACT: Anita Aboulafia 212-267-6646, ext. 225, aaboulafia@nycla.org

 

CHARLES EVANS HUGHES MEMORIAL LECTURE TO BE DELIVERED BY

HON. JOSE CABRANES ON NOVEMBER 18

 

OCTOBER 28, 2008 – NEW YORK, NY – Hon. Jose A. Cabranes of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit will deliver the Charles Evans Hughes Memorial Lecture at the New York County Lawyers’ Association’s (NYCLA) Home of Law at 14 Vesey Street on Tuesday, November 18 beginning at 6:00 PM. The lecture topic will be “Our Imperial Criminal Procedure: Problems in the Extraterritorial Application of U.S. Constitutional Law.” Sponsored by the law firm of Hughes Hubbard & Reed LLP, the lecture series was established 60 years ago to honor 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, Justice Hughes 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.

 

Hon. José A. Cabranes

Judge Cabranes was born in 1940 in Mayagüez, Puerto Rico and at the age of five moved with his family to the South Bronx. After attending public schools in New York City, he graduated from Columbia College (A.B., 1961), Yale Law School (J.D., 1965) and the University of Cambridge, Cambridge, England (M.Litt. in International Law, 1967). He studied at Cambridge under a Kellett Research Fellowship from Columbia College and the Humanitarian Trust Studentship in Public International Law from the Faculty Board of Law of the University of Cambridge.

 

Judge Cabranes was serving as General Counsel of Yale University when he was appointed to the federal bench in 1979; he was the first Puerto Rican appointed to the federal bench in the continental U.S. Previously, he had practiced in a New York City law firm; taught law on the full-time faculty of Rutgers University Law School and the adjunct faculty of Yale Law School; and served as Special Counsel to the Governor of Puerto Rico and as head of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico’s office in Washington, D.C. He is the author of Citizenship and the American Empire (Yale University Press, 1979), a legislative history of the United States citizenship of the people of Puerto Rico, and co-author (with Kate Stith) of Fear of Judging: Sentencing Guidelines in the Federal Courts (University of Chicago Press, 1998) (Certificate of Merit of the American Bar Association, 1999).

 

Hon. Charles Evans Hughes

Mr. 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 personally handle, he hired the most promising law students to help him, and among them 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 firm’s name was changed to Carter, Hughes & Cravath. After a narrow defeat for the Presidency in 1916, Hughes rejoined his old partners and, except for the period from 1921 to 1925, when he was Secretary of State under Presidents Harding and Coolidge, he remained a partner of the firm until his appointment as Chief Justice of the United States in 1930.

 

Past Hughes lecturers have included: Roscoe Pound, Esq.; Whitney North Seymour, Esq., Hon. Jack B. Weinstein, U.S. District Court, Eastern District of New York; Robert MacCrate, former ABA President and Senior Counsel at Sullivan & Cromwell; and, most recently, in 2007, Kenneth C. Frazier, Executive Vice President and President, Global Human Health, at Merck & Co., Inc.

 

The lecture will be followed by a reception. To RSVP, email hughes-rsvp@nycla.org.

 

The Hughes Lecture is one of several events taking place at NYCLAduring its Centennial year celebration, which commenced in April 2007 and ends in December 2008. NYCLA (www.nycla.org) was founded in April 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.

 

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