American Academy of Appellate Lawyers names IIT Chicago-Kent Distinguished Professor Joan E. Steinman Honorary Fellow

IIT Chicago-Kent College of Law Distinguished Professor Joan E. Steinman has been named an Honorary Fellow of the American Academy of Appellate Lawyers. Members are elected by the Academy's board of directors. Professor Steinman will be inducted during the organization's spring meeting April 16 to 18, in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Founded in 1990, the American Academy of Appellate Lawyers is "committed to advancing the administration of justice and promoting the highest standards of professionalism and advocacy in appellate courts." Membership in the Academy is by invitation only, following nomination by current Fellows.

A member of the IIT Chicago-Kent faculty since 1977, Professor Steinman teaches courses in civil procedure, complex litigation, and appellate courts. She was named a Distinguished Professor in 1999.

Professor Steinman is a prolific legal scholar who has written articles on the associational privacy privilege in civil litigation, class actions, suits for money damages to vindicate First Amendment rights, pseudonymous litigation, law of the case doctrine, removal, supplemental jurisdiction, the effects of case consolidation on litigants' procedural rights, several aspects of appellate jurisdiction and procedure, and other procedural issues. She is responsible for two volumes of the Wright, et al., Federal Practice and Procedure treatise, and co-authored a casebook on appellate courts.

Professor Steinman is the first and only scholar to win two Eisenberg prizes from the American Academy of Appellate Lawyers. The award recognizes and encourages "publication of high-quality articles in the field of appellate practice and procedure." In 2005, Professor Steinman received the award for her Georgia Law Review article Irregulars: The Appellate Rights of Persons Who Are Not Full-Fledged Parties. She was similarly honored in 2012 for Appellate Courts as First Responders: The Constitutionality and Propriety of Appellate Courts' Resolving Issues in the First Instance, published in the Notre Dame Law Review.

"The American Academy of Appellate Lawyers is a wonderful organization that is dedicated to promoting high levels of professionalism and advocacy in appellate courts," said Professor Steinman. "I am delighted and very honored to have been invited to become an Honorary Fellow of the Academy, and I am looking forward to working with the other members to improve appellate courts and lawyers' performance in them."

Professor Steinman completed her undergraduate education at the University of Rochester and earned her J.D. from Harvard Law School, where she served on the Harvard Civil Rights–Civil Liberties Law Review. She was admitted to the Illinois Bar in 1973 and practiced with the Chicago law firm of Schiff Hardin & Waite from 1973 to 1977, specializing in civil litigation.

Professor Steinman served as an Advisor on the American Law Institute Federal Judicial Code Project (1996–2004), and on a number of ALI "consultative groups," including those on Principles of the Law of Aggregate Litigation (concluding in 2009), the Complex Litigation Project, the Restatement of the Law, Third, Torts: Product Liability, and the project on Transnational Rules of Civil Procedure. She currently is a member of the consultative groups on conflict of laws, consumer contracts, data privacy, and foreign relations and law. Earlier, she served as the 1992 chair of the Association of American Law Schools Complex Litigation Committee of the Civil Procedure Section, and on the executive committee of the AALS Civil Procedure Section. More recently, she was appointed to the Seventh Circuit Advisory Committee on Circuit Rules, and was a master in the Chicago-Lincoln American Inn of Court.

At IIT Chicago-Kent, Professor Steinman was named a Norman and Edna Freehling Scholar in 1989. She served as interim dean from March 1990 to July 1991. Professor Steinman subsequently earned the Chicago-Kent Distinguished Service Award, the Dean's Prize for Excellence in Teaching, and received awards from the IIT Chicago-Kent Moot Court Honor Society, the IIT Chicago-Kent Student Bar Association, and Illinois Institute of Technology.

Established in 1888, IIT Chicago-Kent College of Law is the law school of Illinois Institute of Technology, also known as Illinois Tech, a private, technology-focused, research university offering undergraduate and graduate degrees in engineering, science, architecture, business, design, human sciences, applied technology, and law.