Eleanor Fox ’61, Walter J. Derenberg Professor of Trade Regulation, received the Antitrust Law Section Public Service Award from the New York State Bar Association on January 30 during the Antitrust Law Section’s annual meeting.
The section gives the award only to a select few exceptional antitrust lawyers who have attained significant stature in the antitrust bar and have contributed meaningfully to the public interest.
“Our section considers Professor Fox to be a role model for the antitrust bar and a leading ambassador to the world for antitrust and competition law,” says Eric Stock, the section’s president as well as the chief of the New York Attorney General’s Antitrust Bureau. “Eleanor is being recognized not only for her work at NYU but also for, among other reasons, her incredible list of scholarly articles and achievements, her pivotal role in a large number of crucial and influential US and international organizations that have furthered the influence and integrity of competition law throughout the world, and her trailblazing role as a female antitrust lawyer in our profession.”
At the January 30 ceremony, Ilene Gotts, a partner at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, introduced Fox’s award, calling Fox “Competition Ambassador to the World.” Gotts mentioned a 2012 item on the NYU Law website with an interactive map of Fox’s summer engagements speaking all over the globe about comparative competition law. Such activities, Gotts said, provided only a hint of the extent of Fox’s influence on the field through her service and scholarship, many aspects of which Gott enumerated.
“What may not be fully evident from the list,” said Gotts, “is how thought-provoking Eleanor’s competition writings often are, challenging us to see the human aspects of competition and industrial policy. Eleanor has looked beyond a narrow lens of economic goals to a more expansive set of goals, to the creation of an environment and a set of rules and principles that will best incentivize firms to be—using Eleanor’s words—‘lively, creative, innovative, and responsive; to produce and invent what people want.’”
Gotts also characterized Fox as “a role model and outspoken champion for women in the legal profession,” mentioning her status as one of a scant few incoming female law students in 1958, who went on to practice law when there were no female partners at her firm, and later joined the Law School faculty full time when few other women had. Gotts added, “It is with this ‘can do’ optimistic attitude and compassion that Eleanor has made a difference to all of us fortunate enough to know her, to count her as a friend, and to have witnessed all that she has achieved in the United States and globally to make the world a better place.”
Posted on January 31, 2014