Appellate Judge Stephen Williams to Deliver Trienens Lecture

CHICAGO --- 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 the School of Law, 357 E. Chicago Ave. It is free and open to the public.

The Howard J. Trienens Visiting Scholar Program was established at the School of Law in 1989 by partners of Sidley Austin 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 is a partner at Sidley Austin since 1956 and a former chair of Sidley's executive committee. He is a life trustee of the Northwestern board of trustees and was 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.

In 1980, Trienens retired as senior vice president and general counsel of AT&T, where he was deeply involved in the restructuring of the Bell system and AT&T following the settlement of the landmark Department of Justice antitrust law suit.

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. Rehnquist, Antonin Scalia, John Paul Stevens, Sandra Day O'Connor and Anthony M. Kennedy.