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Appellate Judge Stephen Williams Delivers Trienens Lecture

February 21, 2008

Judge Stephen F. Williams, U. S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, will discuss “Preemption: First Principles” during his visit to Northwestern University School of Law as this year’s Howard J. Trienens Visiting Judicial Scholar.

The lecture will take place at 4 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 28, at Northwestern Law, 357 E. Chicago Ave. It is free and open to the public.

The Howard J. Trienens Visiting Scholar Program was established at Northwestern Law in 1989 by partners of Sidley Austin LLP to honor Howard Trienens’ service to the firm and Northwestern.

Williams has focused on law and economics in his academic writing and his work as a judge. In his recent book “Liberal Reform in an Illiberal Regime: The Creation of Private Property in Russia, 1906-1915,” Williams tries to extend basic insights of law and economics to problems of governance and political change.

He is currently working on a biography of Vasily Maklakov, a liberal jurist prominent in the period 1905-1917, encompassing the three revolutions of early 20th-century Russia.

Williams was appointed to the U. S. Court of Appeals in June 1986. From 1969 until his appointment to the bench, he taught law at the University of Colorado Law School and spent a number of years visiting at University of California at Los Angeles, Southern Methodist University and the University of Chicago.

Trienens, a partner at Sidley Austin since 1956, has been a member of the Northwestern board of trustees since 1967 and chairman of the board from 1986 to 1995. He received two degrees from Northwestern, a bachelor’s degree in 1945 and a JD in 1949. He was editor in chief of the Illinois Law Review.

Distinguished jurists who have lectured as part of the Trienens Visiting Judicial Scholar Program include U.S. Supreme Court Justices John G. Roberts Jr., William H. Renquist, Antonin Scalia, John Paul Stevens, Sandra Day O’Connor, and Anthony M. Kennedy.

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