I’ll begin my column for this issue of Infrastructure by commending Joe Cosgrove Jr., one of our Section members and an adjunct professor of law at the University of Texas Law School, for his timely and informative article on the ongoing “net neutrality” debate and the D.C. Circuit’s recent decision in Mozilla v. FCC. Joe’s article illustrates the depth and breadth of legal scholarship resident within our Section on some of the most important and economically consequential legal topics of the day. Joe’s article also reminds me that our Section has long been at the forefront of timely addressing important legal issues; we first published, over nine years ago in our Fall 2010 issue of Infrastructure, an article addressing many of the legal and policy issues underlying the net neutrality debate.
January 15, 2020 Columns
Chair’s Column
By Christian F. Binnig
I have no doubt that all of our Section members have the ability, experience, and perspective to provide similar written articles on legal topics of import and importance to our Section members and beyond. I strongly encourage all of you to think of Infrastructure as the equivalent of our Section’s “open mic night.” If you have an article on a legal matter—or an idea for an article on a legal matter—that might be of interest to our Section members, please contact Bill Drexel at [email protected] or contact me at [email protected].
On the subject of important legal and social matters, I’d like to commemorate, and encourage all of you to commemorate with me, the year 2020 as the 100th anniversary of the Nineteenth Amendment guaranteeing women’s constitutional right to vote. Sheila Slocum Hollis, a member of our Section’s Council Group, serves on the ABA’s Commission on the Nineteenth Amendment. Being a child of the 1960s, it is difficult for me to envision that my grandmothers and their female peers lacked such a constitutional right at the time of their birth, and that my mother was born at a time when such a right was still new. The legal profession played an important role in securing these constitutional rights, and this 100th anniversary provides us with a milestone for measuring how far we have come in assuring individual constitutional rights—and how far we have to go.
Finally, I’ll make a brief plug for membership in the ABA and our Section. By now, all of you have been exposed to one aspect of the ABA’s New Membership Value Proposition: the ABA’s restructured (and reduced) annual fee schedule. But that is just one aspect. The ABA’s New Membership Value Proposition includes numerous others, such as expanded free CLE, greater access to the ABA’s knowledge library, and a more responsive and user-friendly website for accessing member services and materials. There is no better time than now for being—or becoming—a member of the ABA and of our Section, and no better time for recruiting those of your colleagues who might benefit from membership in the ABA and in our Section. Becoming a member of the ABA and our Section is easy. All one needs to do is visit the ABA’s home webpage, www.americanbar.org, click on the “join” tab at the top of the page, and follow the relevant registration prompts. In the same vein, we plan to hold in the Spring of 2020, as part of our Section membership outreach and growth initiatives, informal “mixers” with law students at law schools in several urban locations (tentatively New York, Dallas, Washington D.C., and Chicago). These law school mixers will be free to any Section member, and I encourage you to attend one or more of them if you are in the area at the time these mixers take place. Our hope is that these events will provide a springboard for networking with your fellow Section members and with future members of the legal profession. These events are currently in the planning stage, but we will post the time, date, location, and RSVP details for each mixer on our Section webpage on the ABA’s website once those details are finalized.
I hope you find this newest issue of Infrastructure to be valuable and informative. If you have any comments or thoughts about this issue or about other ways in which we might improve your membership experience, please drop me a line.