Professors John Duffy and Ruth Mason of the University of Virginia School of Law have become members of the American Law Institute. The ALI announced their election Friday.

There are now 28 members of the UVA Law faculty currently affiliated with ALI.

The institute produces scholarly work meant to update or otherwise improve the law. The organization includes judges, lawyers and law professors from the U.S. and around the world who are “selected on the basis of professional achievement and demonstrated interest in improving the law,” according to the institute’s website.

Duffy, who joined the Law School in 2011, and Mason, who joined in 2013, were among 24 new members inducted nationwide.

Duffy is the Samuel H. McCoy II Professor of Law and the Paul G. Mahoney Research Professor of Law. He has written articles in numerous prominent law reviews on a wide variety of subjects, including administrative law, constitutional law, law and economics, patent law and legal innovation.

He is also co-author of five editions of the widely used casebook “Patent Law and Policy: Cases and Materials” and of the American Bar Association’s “A Guide to Judicial and Political Review of Federal Agencies.”

In the field of intellectual property, Duffy has been identified as one of the 25 most-influential people in the nation by The American Lawyer and one of the 50 most influential people in the world by the U.K. publication Managing Intellectual Property. In the field of administrative law, Duffy is a past recipient the Annual Scholarship Award conferred by the American Bar Association’s Section on Administrative Law and Regulatory Practice for the best piece of scholarship in the year, for the article “Administrative Common Law in Judicial Review.”

Duffy is of counsel at the law firm Hughes Hubbard and Reed, and serves as a public member of the Administrative Conference of the United States. He was on the legal teams that litigated and unanimously won U.S. Supreme Court decisions in the 2007 case KSR International v. Teleflex — a watershed decision establishing the standard for patentability of innovations — and in the 2017 case TC Heartland v. Kraft Food Brands Group, which curbed so called “forum-shopping” in patent infringement cases.

Duffy received his undergraduate degree in physics from Harvard College and his law degree from the University of Chicago. Prior to entering academia, Duffy clerked for Judge Stephen Williams on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit and for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, served as an attorney-adviser in the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel and practiced law in Washington, D.C.

Mason is the Edwin S. Cohen Distinguished Professor of Law and Taxation, and Class of 1941 Research Professor of Law. Her research focuses on taxation, especially issues related to cross-border taxation — including citizenship-based taxation and taxation within federations and common markets. Her recent work considers multilateral efforts to reform corporate taxation. Mason has an abiding interest in the dormant commerce clause and tax discrimination, and her work in this area has been cited by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Mason has been a visiting professor at Yale Law School and Université Paris 1 (Panthéon Sorbonne). She was a Fulbright senior scholar at the Vienna University of Economics and Business. As professor-in-residence at the International Bureau of Fiscal Documentation in 2018, Mason delivered the 2018 Amsterdam Distinguished Lecture in Taxation. Her lecture focused on the application to U.S. multinational companies of the EU prohibition of tax state aid.

Mason co-edits Kluwer’s Series on International Taxation, and she is a member of the editorial board of the World Tax Journal. She also has served as national reporter for the United States to the International Fiscal Association.

Mason received her undergraduate degree from Columbia University and her law degree from Harvard Law School. Prior to her career in academia, she practiced at Willkie Farr & Gallagher in New York City.

In addition, among the newly elected ALI members is alumna E. Farish Percy ’91, a professor at the University of Mississippi Law School.

Members were selected from confidential nominations submitted by ALI members. ALI formed in 1923 “to promote the clarification and simplification of the law and its better adaptation to social needs, to secure the better administration of justice, and to encourage and carry on scholarly and scientific legal work.”

UVA Law Faculty Members of the American Law Institute

Elected Members:

Life Members:

Founded in 1819, the University of Virginia School of Law is the second-oldest continuously operating law school in the nation. Consistently ranked among the top law schools, Virginia is a world-renowned training ground for distinguished lawyers and public servants, instilling in them a commitment to leadership, integrity and community service.

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