Law Professor Robert Summers is '99 Stevens lecturer

Robert S. Summers, the William G. McRoberts Professor of Research in the Administration of the Law at the Cornell Law School, will give the school's 1999 Robert S. Stevens Lecture. The title of the lecture is "The Place of Form in the Fundamentals of Law," and it will take place March 31 at 4 p.m. in the MacDonald Moot Court Room in Myron Taylor Hall.

The lecture will address basic issues in the theory of law and will examine the nature and importance of legal form -- of how law is organized. Summers will stress the significance of choices of appropriate form for the law's means and ends, and he will argue that form even defines and expresses certain fundamental political values. He asserts that form is an essential but neglected subject in U.S. law school curriculums, whereas in Europe it is a serious subject for legal scholars.

Summers, who received his LL.B. from Harvard in 1959, is the author of numerous books, including The Uniform Commercial Code (with James J. White; West Publishing, 4th edition, 1995). The four-volume treatise is considered the most influential treatment of the largest body of private law ever adopted by American state legislatures. Other significant books by Summers include Law, Its Nature, Function and Limits (West Publishing, 1986), Form and Substance in Anglo American Law (with P.S. Atiyah; Oxford University Press, 1991), Instrumentalism in American Legal Theory (Cornell, 1982) and Lon L. Fuller (Stanford University Press, 1984).

Summers has been a member of the Cornell law faculty since 1969, assuming his endowed professorship in 1976. In 1993 he was the recipient of a festschrift -- a collection of papers delivered by colleagues and former students honoring his contributions as a scholar and teacher.

The Stevens Lecture Series was established by Phi Alpha Delta law fraternity in 1955 in honor of former Law School Dean Robert S. Stevens. The series provides law students with an opportunity to expand their legal education beyond classroom lessons on substantive and procedural law.

Former Stevens lecturers include statesman Elliot Richardson; senior U.S. District Court Judge Constance Baker Motley; Jack M. Balkin, professor of law at Yale University Law School; and Jesse H. Choper, professor of law at the University of California, Berkeley.