By tradition, at their first Executive Council meeting, incoming Society Presidents provide an overview of their intentions. Below are excerpted remarks by ASIL President José E. Alvarez at the dinner meeting of the Council on March 30, 2006.

I did not anticipate that my first act as incoming President would be to participate in a "conversation" among a noted TV commentator best known for her role in one of the recent Presidential debates, the U.S. Secretary of State, the President of the World Court, and the first woman named to the U.S. Supreme Court. This was a "Where's Waldo" moment. I felt like the answer to a typical question on a standardized test: "which one of these does not belong in this set?"

I hope that during my Presidency many other men will experience the same insecurity. Our annual meeting panels ought to provoke some discomfort among male panelists. After all, for too long our Society accorded only token representation to women and minorities; it is long past time to put the shoe on the other foot. I would like my Presidency to be a time for going beyond the usual suspects; a time when we debunk the myth that the Society, and by extension, international law, is of interest only to liberal, white males in certain Northeast "blue" states.

This commitment is personal. I immigrated to the United States at the age of six, with parents who never learned English and whose education did not extend beyond high school. I am the first member of my extended family to complete college; the only one to re-locate outside the comfort of Latino-majority environs. Although today I would be considered, in all but background and name- an exotic one amidst the illustrious list on the ASIL Presidential mug-another member of the traditional white liberal elite, the schooling and luck that enabled this transformation have never quite washed away my "outsider" sense of self. Reaching out to those outside of our mainstream, whether because of politics, geography, social or other status, comes naturally. I want our Society to be as welcoming as this country has been to me. I want more minorities and women, more West-coasters and mid-westerners, more practitioners, more Republicans, more "foreigners," and more non-lawyers to be part of us.Whether or not it is right that our government should want to democratize the world, it ought not be controversial that we should want to democratize our Society. All those interested in "foreign" affairs (or who believe that no such category now exists) should be part of our common enterprise.

The strive for diversity explains why I have urged my new program co-chairs for the 101st meeting-William Aceves, Charles Hunnicutt, and Chantal Thomas-to resist appointing members of their own committee to panels, to avoid turning to panelists from the 100th annual meeting, to desist from allowing anyone to "double dip" in the meeting's program, and to find more "new voices" through open submissions. At this fervent time in our discipline, we should be reaching out to those from other disciplines, to academic colleagues who presently do not see themselves as "doing" international law but are increasingly engaged in matters international, as well as to other groups, such as the American Bar Association's international law section, the International Law Association, and the Council on Foreign Relations.We should also be living up to the "American" in our name through joint projects with institutions south as well as north of our border (as we have begun to do with the Organization of American States' Inter- American Juridical Committee; see p. 13). We should continue and strengthen our exploration of common concerns with other "learned" societies abroad (as we have done most recently in India and China, and will do through a forthcoming project this summer with the Australian and New Zealand, Japanese, and Canadian societies of international law; see p. 10).

The Society is in a state of transition in other ways. The end of 2006 will mark the end of our executive director's statutory 12-year term. Much as we are diversifying our program activity, we must also diversify our funding to include new grants and sponsorships. And in order to extend the success we have had with judges to members of Congress and their staffs, as well as with the media and the general public, we will need to find creative ways to have more lawyerly expertise within Tillar House, as through interns and visiting scholars.With some imagination, ASIL could emerge as a new kind of D.C.-based think tank, a member-driven organization that marries research with outreach. The Society also needs to re-dedicate itself to furthering international law by enhancing the professional development of international lawyers. The unprecedented interest in international law evident throughout our government, in our nation's law firms, and among U.S. law school deans affords opportunities for the Society to establish speakers bureaus to serve relevant government offices (and not just the Legal Adviser's office at the State Department), on-site CLE-type programs for practicing attorneys interested in addressing matters of general public interest as well as issues of more direct billable interest, and resource-rich toolkits to help law schools challenged by the attempt to incorporate international or transnational law into ever more crowded law school curriculums.

Advancing the quality of the work of international lawyers also involves getting past our complacency, our Grotian presumption that global welfare is invariably advanced through ever-greater recourse to more international rules and institutions. The study of international law should not be confused with unexamined celebration of it.To this end, I would hope to see more professional development programs like the international law conference for existing law teachers that we are co-sponsoring with the Association of American Law Schools in the summer of 2007 entitled, "What is Wrong with the Way we Teach and Write about International Law?"

Finally, we need to accept that even learned societies do not operate in ivory towers. As University of Toledo's Ben Davis's initiative to have the Society endorse a resolution on issues emerging from the "war" on terror reminds us, sometimes the world wants to hear our collective judgment-and will judge us harshly if we duck. For reasons that I explained in my May 18th column in IL.post, while I supported the resolution ultimately adopted at our 100th meeting, I am concerned about how we got there and have appointed a committee chaired by Miriam Sapiro, Summit Strategies International, to come up with better procedures for handling comparable initiatives. Inspired in part by the web-based commentary on the Ben Davis resolution, I have also appointed a task force, chaired by Harvard's Detlev Vagts, to consider the professional responsibilities of international lawyers.

These then are some of the items on my short-term agenda to transform the Society in ways that complement the on-going transformations within international law.

José E. Alvarez