4/15/2004 -
By THE POST-JOURNAL Staff
Frank Ernest Arnold Sander, former law clerk to Justice Felix Frankfurter, will
participate in an April 28 discussion of the famous U.S. Supreme Court decision
in Brown v. Board of Education.
The Robert H. Jackson Center is hosting a roundtable discussion with former
law clerks involved in the case at 10:30 a.m. Wednesday, April 28, in the Cappa
Theater of the Robert H. Jackson Center. Anyone interested in attending must
be seated by 10 a.m. No one will be admitted after this time because of technical/production
purposes. The event is free of charge and open to the public.
Following the roundtable, the public is invited at no charge to a luncheon reception
in the center's banquet room. The luncheon is funded through the generosity
of Chautauqua Abstract, Habiterra Architects and Landscape Architects, the Jamestown
Area Chamber of Commerce and the Jamestown Bar Association.
''We are excited to have Professor Sander join our roundtable discussion as
we further examine the record on this landmark case and the events that led
to the decision to end segregation in public schools,'' said Greg Peterson,
the center's board of directors president. ''Professor Sander brings a unique
perspective continuing in the spirit of Brown v. Board of Education as he later
served, in 1966, as the director of a summer program at Harvard Law School,
which brought 40 black college students to Cambridge for the purpose of interesting
them in pursuing a legal career.''
Sander was born in Stuttgart, Germany, in 1927, and came to Brookline, Mass.,
in 1940. In 1949, he received an A.B. degree magna cum laude in mathematics
and the L.L.B. degree magna cum laude in 1952 from Harvard. After receiving
the L.L.B. and joining the Harvard faculty, Sander served as law clerk to Chief
Judge Magruder of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit (1952-53)
and as law clerk to Justice Felix Frankfurter, U.S. Supreme Court (1953-54).
Following that, he was an attorney in the Tax Division of the Department of
Justice, Washington, D.C. (1954-56) and was associated with the Boston firm
of Hill and Barlow (1956-59). An expert in taxation, family law and dispute
settlement, Sander became professor of law at Harvard Law School in 1962, a
Bussey professor in 1981 and served as associate dean from 1987-2000.
From 1961 to 1963, Sander served as a member of the Committee on Civil and Political
Rights of President Kennedy's Commission on the Status of Women; from 1968 to
1970 he served as the chairman of the Council on Legal Education Opportunity,
a national organization devoted to the recruitment and training of disadvantaged
persons for the law. In 1970, Sander was appointed to the Massachusetts Commission
on Adoption and Foster Care, and in 1975 he was appointed chairman of the Massachusetts
State Welfare Advisory Board.
Since 1975, Sander has been active in the subject of alternative methods of
dispute resolution. He teaches several dispute resolution courses at Harvard
Law School. In 1980, he became chairman of the Council on the Role of Courts,
a group of 26 scholars, lawyers and judges seeking to delineate the proper function
of courts in the United States. In 1990, he was appointed by the Chief Justice
of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts to the Commission on the Future
of the Courts and served as co-chairman of the Commission's Task Force on Alternative
Paths to Justice.
Sander is the director of the Harvard Law School Program on Dispute Resolution.
Sander has received recognition and many awards for his work. In 1988, he was
awarded the Whitney North Seymour Medal by the American Arbitration Association;
in 1989, the American Bar Association established the Frank E. A. Sander Lecture
Series on dispute resolution; he received the Robert J. Kutak medal from the
American Bar Association in 1993. In 1999, he was awarded the D'Alemberte-Raven
medal for outstanding contributions to the field of dispute resolution.
He is a member of the American, Massachusetts and Boston Bar associations and
lives with his wife in Cambridge, Mass.