On This Day... February 21st, 2020
What happened around this time in FBA’s history? See below for some pretty cool tidbits.
February 1972: With the formation of a Central New York Chapter, the FBA now has 100 chapters.
February 1985: This month’s issue of the Federal Bar News & Journal is devoted to the Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1984, the most sweeping overhaul of the federal criminal justice code in U.S. history, with an introduction by U.S. Attorney General William French Smith and articles by federal legislators including Sens. Edward Kennedy, Strom Thurmond, Arlen Specter, and Joseph R. Biden.
February 1990: With the Berlin Wall having come down just three months before and Eastern bloc countries throwing off Soviet control, the FBA’s International Law Section (ILS) establishes the Democracy Development Initiative (DDI). Under the program, members can offer their expert knowledge of federal institutions on a pro bono basis to “help the emerging democracies in Eastern and Central Europe (the USSR had not at that time split apart) develop their own institutions, based on the rule of law and democratic principles,” according to DDI Co-Chair William K. Ince and ILS Past President Brian C. Murphy, writing in the Federal Bar News & Journal in September 1992. Within two years of forming, DDI has a “talent bank” of more than 200 members. Among its first missions comes in the fall of 1990, in response to a direct request from the Russian Constitutional Commission for the FBA to send a representative to Moscow to help draft the new Russian constitution. FBA member William T. D’Zurilla makes the trip, spending several weeks advising Russian President Boris Yeltsin and the commission.
Feb. 13, 2001: At a news conference at the Supreme Court, FBA President Robert A. McNew and American Bar Association President Martha Barnett present Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist with Federal Judicial Pay Erosion: A Report on the Need for Reform. Finding that federal judges have received only three of eight possible cost-of-living adjustments since 1933 and suffered a 13.4-percent decline in purchasing power in that time, the joint FBA–ABA report warns that this issue threatens the quality and independence of the judiciary. “I’ve read the report,” Rehnquist says, “and I think it does a very fine job of explaining just what’s happened over the past few years to the judiciary in terms of pay, and why it is really essential that we do something to turn this around.”