For Immediate Release—Friday, January 19, 2007
Contact:
Mary E. McCrank
Media Relations Officer
(585) 245-5516
Editor's note: Kendall will be available for a media
briefing before his talk to speak with reporters. The briefing will be held
from 3:30-4 p.m. Feb. 5 in 203 Newton Hall. If you plan to attend, please call
the college's media relations officer at (585) 245-5516 or (585) 414-8037.
David E. Kendall, Personal Attorney for the Clintons,
to Deliver Phi Beta Kappa Lecture Feb. 5 at SUNY Geneseo
GENESEO,
N.Y.—David E. Kendall, who has served as personal attorney for Bill and
Hillary Clinton since 1993, will deliver the State University of New York at
Geneseo's annual Phi Beta Kappa lecture at 4:30 p.m. Monday, Feb. 5, in 203
Newton Hall.
The talk, titled "The Great War Today," is free and open to
the public. Kendall will talk about World War I, as refracted through its
literature and history—the changing and evolving attempts to assess its
facts and causes. He will explore the relationship, if any, between the war's
literature and history and will talk about the ramifications and influences of
the Great War.
Kendall, a partner in the Washington, D.C., law firm
Williams & Connolly LLP since 1981, began representing President Bill
Clinton and former first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton in November 1993, in what
was ostensibly a small savings and loan matter involving Whitewater Development
Company, Inc. He went on to represent the Clintons in a variety of matters,
including the 1998-99 impeachment proceedings. Kendall continues to represent
Bill Clinton and Hillary Rodham Clinton, now a U.S. Senator representing New
York state, in civil litigation.
Kendall was first acquainted with the legal justice system
when he was arrested several times (but convicted only once) in Mississippi
during the summer of 1964 while attempting to register African-American voters.
After receiving his bachelor's degree from Wabash College in Indiana in 1966,
he attended Oxford University in England as a Rhodes Scholar. He earned his
master's degree in English language and literature in 1968 from Oxford. In
1971, Kendall earned his juris doctorate from Yale Law School. After
graduation, he served for a year as a law clerk for U.S. Supreme Court Justice
Byron R. White and then as a second lieutenant in the U.S. Army from 1972-73.
Kendall then spent five years as associate counsel at the
NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund, Inc., litigating a variety of civil
rights cases and concentrating in defending death penalty cases.
Kendall has represented a number of individual and corporate
media clients over the years, defending libel, privacy invasion, and copyright
suits and fighting subpoenas to news gatherers. His clients have included The
Washington Post, Newsweek, National Enquirer
(where he supervised prepublication copy review for over a decade and a half), Playboy, Discovery Communications, U.S. Medicine, and National Review. He also has advised the Motion Picture Association of
America, the Recording Industry Association of America and AOL. Recently, he
represented a number of copyright holders in anti-piracy suits against Internet
services.
Kendall is the author of several articles on constitutional,
media and criminal law and has taught law courses at Columbia Law School and
Georgetown University Law Center. He is on the Board of Directors of the NAACP
Legal Defense & Educational Fund, Inc.
In 2004, Geneseo became the first non-doctoral undergraduate
institution within SUNY to house a Phi Beta Kappa chapter. The college is one
of only 270 colleges and universities in the nation to have a Phi Beta Kappa
chapter, the nation's best known and most significant academic honor society.
###