Prof. Robert A. Stein (’61) Receives Global Engagement Award

Professor Robert A. Stein (’61), the Everett Fraser Professor of Law, has been honored with a 2016 Award for Global Engagement by the University’s Global Programs and Strategy Alliance office. This award is given to faculty and staff to acknowledge exceptional achievements in and contributions to global education, research, and engagement on behalf of the University.

Throughout his four decades as a faculty member, Stein has consistently made transformative contributions to engage the Law School in nearly every region of the world. During his 15 years as dean, he established student and faculty exchange programs with universities in Sweden, France, Germany, Poland, Mexico, and China. The partnership with Uppsala University in Sweden, which continues to flourish after more than 30 years, is especially noteworthy, but hardly unique. In China, for instance, Stein worked with university and bar leaders to develop the country’s current system of legal education. As a result, the number of lawyers in China rose from fewer than 100 in 1980 to more than 250,000 today. Stein’s extensive international experience also informed his work in developing one of the first rule of law courses taught in any American law school. The very popular course focuses on law reform activities in newly established democracies, examining the ways in which these nations create legal infrastructures to support the development of the rule of law.

In addition to building the institutional capacity of the Law School for global engagement, Stein has been an internationally known advocate for advancing rule of law everywhere. During his 12 years away from the University (1994-2006), when he served as executive director of the American Bar Association, he supervised law reform programs in more than 25 countries in Central and Eastern Europe and in Asia. Stein’s administration of the ABA has been widely recognized as a time of focus on rule of law development around the world. He has recently published a book on the topic, co-authored and co-edited with Richard J. Goldstone, a former justice on the Constitutional Court of South Africa, entitled The Rule of Law in the 21st Century: A Worldwide Perspective.

“I can think of no one more deserving of this honor,” said Dean David Wippman. “With one accomplishment alone—founding and nurturing the exchange program with Uppsala University, our first and most productive such program—Professor Stein made the Law School an active global educator. But his vision that every law student have an international or comparative law experience took us much further, and continues to guide us. Our course offerings, our numerous exchange programs, our attention to global matters, the students in our classes from Asia, the Middle East, South America, and all parts of the globe—for all of this, and much more, we are in Professor’s Stein’s debt.”