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August 18, 2021 Columns

Chair’s Message

Erica Levine Powers

My fourth message as Section Chair is my swan song. It is an opportunity to consider the year, which has been entirely virtual—conferences, webinars, Executive Committee and Council, all substantive committees, Content Advisory Board, Urban Lawyer Advisory Board, Publications Oversight Board, biweekly leadership calls, ABA Section Officers Council calls, all online. 

We have seen one another’s faces. We have become respectful of time zones. We have had a few moments to chat before a meeting begins. One lawyer starts out wearing a cat mask and makes us laugh. The Immediate Past Chair holds a sleeping two-year-old grandchild. The Young Lawyers Division liaison leaps up briefly when his daughter wakes from a nap. Some things are hard. Our Director of Publishing at ABA Publications is slowly recovering from COVID-19, contracted after two vaccinations. In a country and a world where there are many, many new things to deal with in the news every day, we all are tired. 

As diversity, equity, and inclusion have become front-page national issues, I can gratefully say that our Section operates from the front-end, with diversity, equity, and inclusion as part of our daily operations, as it has been for many years. This Section is open to younger and older lawyers, diverse lawyers, with different abilities and different skills. Walking into a room with us—this year, a virtual room—is where someone determines where she belongs, and is welcome. 

Our many committees collaborate on programs, for example the Diversity Law Committee, the Judicial Committee and Young Lawyers producing three related diversity programs for Midyear. We have recently formed an Asian American Pacific Islanders subcommittee of the Diversity Law Committee, with a mission to reflect the variety of the Asian experience.

We have had notable successes this year: outstanding programming on the impact of COVID, in October; in April, joint programming with the Health Law Section on COVID vaccinations; and the first published article on the Impact of COVID on Higher Education, published in The Urban Lawyer this winter. The Section also had a highly successful January webinar series on Affordable Housing, with a related Resolution passed by the House of Delegates at Midyear, in February.  

There was a joint online Spring Conference with the Young Lawyers Division in April, blending substantive law and programs on careers and mentoring at their request. We are very grateful to Oregon Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum, a past Chair, for her assistance in putting together a panel of five Attorneys General of color for that conference. Due to a virtual setting, they were able to participate from all over the country.

We just finished the acclaimed Inaugural National Institute on Resiliency and are preparing for three programs on Tribal Lending in August, at Annual. The Annual programs are a joint effort of the Attorneys General/Department of Justice Issues Committee and the Native American Tribal Law Committee. Finally, our second National Institute, on the Uniform Partition of Heirs Property Act, will be at the end of August, leading to the launch of a related book.

I particularly want to thank Daiquiri J. Steele for her term as Editor of The Urban Lawyer, beginning at the end of October. She has produced three issues of interesting, high-quality articles. Effective August 1, 2021, she will join the faculty of the University of Alabama School of Law, a responsibility that precludes her continuing as Editor, but she remains active in Section leadership.

The COVID year has put us in a position and a mood to reexamine what we have done in the past. Instead of charging for CLE upfront, we have gone to a less-expensive model of recorded Zoom webinars with CLE available later, for a fee, on-demand. Virtual programming has made it possible for younger lawyers, and lawyers in small firms or government offices, to participate without incurring travel time and costs. 

To the extent that COVID has exacerbated the continuing financial impact of declining membership throughout ABA, attributable to the retirement or death of a cohort of older lawyers, we have to reexamine our budget priorities. Fortunately, thoughtful Section leaders in multiple committees are working on this. I am very grateful for their time and commitment. 

Thanks, as always, to our superb staff: Tamara Edmonds-Askew, Section Director; Marsha Boone, Program Specialist; Rhonda Davis, Content Specialist; Sarah Craig, Executive Editor, Book Publishing; Susan Lorimor, Managing Editor, State & Local Law News; Julie Furgerson, Managing Editor, The Urban Lawyer; and Dr. Martha-Marie Kleinhans, Director, Business and Program Development, ABA-CLE.

And so I hand the gavel—virtually—to Steve Stapleton, secure in the knowledge that his commitment and good humor as Chair will see the Section through the next unanticipated year.

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Erica Levine Powers

Erica Levine Powers, Chair of the Section, is a mediator in Albany, NY, a transactional and regulatory lawyer, an academic, lead editor of Beyond the Fracking Wars (2013), and co-editor with Thomas W. Mitchell of a forthcoming book on heirs’ property.