Title: President, and Author
Company: International Academic Institute of Legal Process and Procedure
Location: Dallas, Texas; New York, New York, United States
John Attanasio, lawyer, educator, author and president of The International Academic Institute of Legal Process and Procedure, has been recognized by Marquis Who’s Who Top Educators for dedication, achievements, and leadership in legal education.
Mr. Attanasio is President of the International Academic Institute of Legal Process and Procedure, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation focused on legal and related training of judges, government officials and lawyers since 2016. Institute members include: a former Director-General of the German Chancellor’s Office, a former Justice of the European Court of Justice, the president of the Dallas Committee on Foreign Relations, former General Counsel of the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC) who is a professor at Georgetown Law School, former president of the Community’s Foundation of Texas, former president of the American Bar Association, several prominent private equity investors, and former presidents of for-profit and not-for-profit corporations. Several are also nationally and internationally recognized attorneys, arbitrators, and mediators. Collectively, Institute members have vast experience with educational and exchange programs involving judges, legislators, government officials, and lawyers from all over the world.
Mr. Attanasio has advised courts and governments around the world on broad-ranging issues of governance and economics. He was inspired to enter the law to help people, especially the less fortunate. From 2001-2012, he was Director of the Rule of Law Forum which brought to the U.S. 12 high-ranking delegations from Indonesia, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, China, Brunei, Kyrgyz Republic, Oman, Bahrain, and Afghanistan for meetings with U.S. Supreme Court Justices, Senators, Cabinet Ministers, etc.
He has organized or co-organized 7 international Supreme Court Summits in which 10 different U.S. Supreme Court Justices have participated. In 1990, he was the first Fulbright Award winner to teach American Constitutional law in the Soviet Union. He helped found the Appellate Judges Education Institute, now at the National Judicial College. He team-taught courses with three different Justices of the South African Constitutional Court, including with its first black President; with a Deputy of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR in 1990; and with a Justice of the European Court of Justice.
He has lectured in over 30 countries, and to many highest Court Justices, Ministers, Ambassadors, CEOs, and MPs. He delivered the inaugural lecture of the Business and Law Lecture Series at the University of North Texas, Dallas in 2019.
A prolific author, his 2018 book, Politics and Capital: Auctioning the American Dream is published by Oxford University Press. The book jacket includes testimonials by renowned philosopher Michael Walzer and eminent law professors from NYU and Yale. Politics and Capital is available in top libraries around the world such as: Yale, Harvard, Princeton, Oxford, Chicago, Michigan, Penn, Virginia, Brown, Cornell, Colombia Amherst, NYU, Cambridge, Stanford, Berkeley, etc. It is also featured on the OUP SoundCloud podcast.
In 2018 and 2019, he co-authored several essays with prominent faculty from NYU and Yale Law Schools. He has co-authored two books with the British Institute of International and Comparative Law, and many editions of Constitutional Law casebooks and treatises with LexisNexis. Co-authors included the Dean and a renowned comparative constitutionalist from NYU Law School, and two Rhodes Scholars. He has published numerous articles in premier law reviews. His writing and teaching focus on constitutional law, litigation and dispute resolution, law and philosophy, comparative law, law and religion, and law and economics.
In 2014, the SMU Law Review published a symposium issue entitled Rule of Law Symposium in Honor of John Attanasio. Authors include: a former U.S. Supreme Court Justice, two Justices of the highest court of Europe, and a dedication by Judge and former Yale Dean Guido Calabresi. For more, visit: http://scholar.smu.edu/smulr/vol67/iss4. He is a recipient of the Albert Nelson Marquis Lifetime Achievement Award.
Mr. Attanasio has held three endowed chaired professorships. He was Distinguished Visiting Fellow at NYU Law School. He served as Dean of both SLU Law School, where he was the youngest dean in the U.S., and SMU Law School for three five-year terms. He shattered fundraising records at both schools, raising over $125 million. At both institutions, he also dramatically increased the admissions and placement profiles of students elevating these to completely unprecedented levels, and hired many distinguished permanent and visiting faculty. He led extensive curricular and administrative innovations. He helped to establish a new international LL.M. program at SLU and tripled the size of that program at SMU. He dramatically increased both student scholarships and capital reserves at both schools.
Mr. Attanasio earned a BA from the University of Virginia, a JD from New York University, a Diploma in Law from Oxford University, and an LL.M. from Yale University. He taught law at the University of Pittsburgh and at the University of Notre Dame, where he also was Director of the interdisciplinary Joan B. Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies.
Mr. Attanasio is licensed to practice in Maryland and before the U.S. Supreme Court. He is a member of the American Law Institute, the American and Dallas Bar Associations, and a life fellow of the American Bar Foundation. He chaired the Out-of-the-Box Committee on the Future of Legal Education, and the Board of the Notre Dame Center for Civil and Human Rights.
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