January 01, 2005

Roberta Cooper Ramo , a shareholder of Modrall Sperling, has been re-elected to another one-year term as first vice president of the Counsel of the American Law Institute (ALI). The ALI Council, a group of 65 prominent judges, practicing lawyers, and legal scholars, is the governing body of the Institute. Ramo, who has been practicing law since 1972, was the first woman in history to serve as president of the American Bar Association. She concentrates her practice in the areas of mediation, arbitration, business law, real estate, probate, and estate planning.

Ramo is presently Chair of the ABA’s Asia Law Initiative Council and a member of the CPR Institute for Dispute Resolution’s National Panel of Distinguished Neutrals. She is an honorary member of the Bar of England and Wales and of Gray’s Inn and a fellow of both the American College of Trust and Estate Counsel and of the American Bar Foundation.

Additionally, she is former president of the Albuquerque Bar Association, a two-time recipient of the State Bar of New Mexico’s Outstanding Contribution Award, and a recipient of the Governor’s Distinguished Public Service Award for community service in New Mexico. In February 2003, the United States Senate appointed her to co-chair a committee to review and make suggestions for change of the United States Olympic Committee. Prior to that, she initiated a national campaign to combat family violence by creating the ABA’s National Commission on Domestic Violence, and in 1995 she was appointed by then Attorney General Janet Reno and Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala to serve on the then newly created United States Advisory Council on Violence Against Women. Ramo has lectured both nationally and internationally on various legal subjects and has edited, authored and contributed to numerous books, articles and other publications. She has received honorary degrees from five universities.

The American Law Institute was founded in 1923 and is based in Philadelphia. The Institute, through a careful and deliberative process, drafts and then publishes various restatements of the law, model codes, and other proposals for legal reform “to promote the clarification and simplification of the law and its better adaptation to social needs, to secure the better administration of justice, and to encourage and carry on scholarly and scientific legal work.” Its membership consists of judges, practicing lawyers, and legal scholars from all areas of the United States as well as some foreign countries, selected on the basis of professional achievement and demonstrated interest in the improvement of the law. The Institute’s incorporators included Chief Justice and former President William Howard Taft, future Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes, and former Secretary of State Elihu Root. Judges Benjamin N. Cardozo and Learned Hand were among its early leaders.

The Institute’s restatements, model codes, and legal studies are used as references by the entire legal profession.