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Judge John E. Jones III, Penn State Law adjunct professor, elected to American Law Institute


UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. -- The Hon. John E. Jones III, judge for the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania and adjunct professor at Penn State Law, has been elected to the American Law Institute (ALI), joining its group of exceptional judges, lawyers, and legal academics. ALI is the leading independent organization in the United States, producing scholarly work to clarify, modernize, and otherwise improve the law.

ALI membership is limited to 3,000 distinguished lawyers, judges, and law professors, and includes about 1,400 additional ex officio, honorary, and life members. The institute drafts, discusses, revises, and publishes Restatements of the Law, model statutes, and principles of law that are extremely influential in the courts and legislatures, as well as in legal scholarship and education.

An alumnus of The Dickinson School of Law, Jones was nominated to serve on the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania by President George W. Bush and unanimously confirmed by the U.S. Senate on July 30, 2002. He has presided over a number of high-profile cases, including Whitewood v. Wolf, declaring Pennsylvania's ban on same-sex marriage unconstitutional, and Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, the landmark case declaring that intelligent design cannot constitutionally be taught in a public school science class. 

A recipient of the Law School's Outstanding Alumni Award, Jones serves on the Law School's Board of Counselors. In May, 2006 Jones was named by Time magazine as one of its Time 100, the one hundred most influential people in the world. He has also received a Rave Award for Policy from Wired magazine. In 2006, Jones was the recipient of the first John Marshall Judicial Independence Award, given by the Pennsylvania Bar Association. In 2009, he was the recipient of the Geological Society of America’s 2009 President’s Medal, and, in the same year, was inducted into the George Washington Spirit Society.

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