The Harvard Jewish Alumni Network
is proud to announce its inaugural event featuring
Professor Eli Wald (SJD ’01)
speaking on
A Case Study in Bias and Resilience:
The History of Large Jewish Law Firms
September 12, 2024 at 2p ET/11a PT by Zoom
(Link and Details to Follow)
During the “golden era” in the 1950s and 1960s, large American law firms were segregated along religious and cultural lines between WASP and Jewish law firms. Although the large firms purported to be a-religious and meritocratic, the firms in fact commonly discriminated against Jewish lawyers. The result was the rise and growth of Jewish law firms. As last as 1950, there was not a single large Jewish law firm in New York. By the mid-1960s, six of the 20 largest law firms were Jewish, and, by 1980, four of the 10 largest law firms were Jewish. Professor Wald, who has widely published and spoken on this history, will discuss this history of bias and immigrant triumph and answer questions.
Prof. Eli Wald is the Charles W. Delaney Jr. Professor of Law at the University of Denver Sturm College of Law. A legal ethics and legal profession scholar, Wald has written on topics such as access to legal services, increased lawyer mobility, conflict of interests and attorney disqualification, lawyers' fiduciary duties to clients, the nationalization and globalization of law practice, the challenges facing lawyers representing clients in the emerging marijuana industry and, most recently, BigLaw and in-house lawyers. Professor Wald is a co-author of a leading casebook on the law governing lawyers. His work has appeared in leading journals such as the Alabama, Fordham, Stanford, University of Colorado and Wisconsin law reviews, the Georgetown Journal of Legal Ethics, and the UC Law Journal. Wald’s articles have been cited in ABA ethics opinions and excerpted in legal ethics casebooks.
Professor Wald's ongoing research into the causes and manifestations of explicit prejudice and implicit bias at large law firms and in-house legal departments, as well as means of overcoming discrimination, has gained national attention. His scholarship examines the structure and organization of law firms and in-house departments as well as the professional and personal identities of their lawyers to better understand the hiring and promotion patterns of law firms, and the lingering under-representation of minorities in positions of power and influence. Wald's articles have explored the rise and fall of WASP and Jewish law firms, the role of kinship and nepotism in law firms' promotion decisions, the discriminatory consequences of professional ideology, and implicit bias and structural discrimination in BigLaw and in-house legal departments.
Wald serves on the ABA House of Delegates, is a member of the Colorado Supreme Court Standing Committee on the Colorado Rules of Professional Conduct, Chair Elect of the Colorado State Bar Association's Ethics Committee, and a member of the Colorado Judicial Ethics Advisory Board. A past member of the executive committee of the Association of American Law Schools' Professional Responsibility Section, and a longtime co-editor of the Legal Profession Section of JOTWELL – The Journal of Things We Like (Lots), Professor Wald is an expert witness in legal ethics and malpractice matters, and a frequent legal ethics CLE instructor. At the law school, his accomplishments include winning the best faculty advisor award, and being named a Chu Family Faculty Fellow and the Hughes-Ruud Research Professor.
Prior to joining the Sturm College of Law, Professor Wald was a litigation associate at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison in New York City. He holds S.J.D. and LL.M. degrees from Harvard Law School, where he was a John Olin Fellow in Law and Economics, a Fellow at the Center for Ethics and the Professions, and a Clark Byse Fellow. Wald also earned LL.B. and B.A. degrees from Tel-Aviv University, where he was a law review editor and a Visiting Fellow at the Max Plunk Institutes in Hamburg and Heidelberg, Germany.
Event Information
Virtual Event Instructions: