Welcome from The Honorable Emily C. Hewitt, Chief Judge

Welcome from the Honorable Emily C. Hewitt, Chief Judge

It is my pleasure and honor as Chief Judge to welcome you to our website and to our court.

The court is fortunate to have the support of a distinguished Advisory Council and an exemplary Bar Association, and I enjoy working with both organizations on issues and events important to the court. I encourage members of the court’s bar to join and to participate in the United States Court of Federal Claims Bar Association as a way to become more familiar both with the court and with your colleagues in the bar.

The Court of Federal Claims Bar Association is instrumental in sponsoring two of the court’s signature annual events. The first is Law Day, which we celebrated this past year on Tuesday May 10, 2011. We were honored to have as our Law Day speaker Professor Daniel R. Coquillette, Esq., J. Donald Monan, S.J., University Professor at Boston College Law School and Charles Warren Visiting Professor of American Legal History at Harvard Law School, who spoke on the topic of “The Boston Massacre.”

The second event is the court’s Annual Judicial Conference. The 24th Annual Judicial Conference was held on October 18-19, 2011 in Berkeley, California at the Claremont Hotel, with a special session at the University of California School of Law at Berkeley on the afternoon of October 19, 2011. The Conference provided a wide variety of panels addressing issues in the major areas of the court’s jurisdiction as well as addresses by the Hon. Randolph R. Rader, Chief Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, and the Hon. Tony West, Assistant Attorney General, Civil Division, United States Department of Justice. In addition, a full program of concurrent sessions was offered by the Special Masters of the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program.

This year, Law Day will be celebrated at a luncheon at the Willard Hotel on Tuesday, May 1, 2012. The theme for Law Day is selected each year by the American Bar Association. The theme for Law Day 2012 is “No Courts, No Justice, No Freedom.” We are delighted to welcome as our 2012 Law Day Speaker Linda Greenhouse, who served for thirty years as Supreme Court reporter for The New York Times and is now a Senior Research Scholar in Law, the Knight Distinguished Journalist in Residence and Joseph M. Goldstein Senior Fellow at the Yale Law School.

Registration for this year’s Law Day luncheon begins early in 2012. Please visit the Bar Association website, www.cfcbar.org, for more information.

Registration for the 25th Annual Judicial Conference, to be held next fall in Washington, DC, will be open this summer. Please visit the Bar association website, www.cfcbar.org, for more information.

From time to time I will update this greeting to keep you apprised of recent and upcoming events. Thank you for your interest in the United States Court of Federal Claims.