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Richard Dreyfuss has relied on intelligence, energy and talent to gain and keep his place among the leading actors of the American cinema. Three of his films, in fact, were included in the American Film Institute's list of the greatest 100 films. One of his notable roles was as the teacher in Mr. Holland's Opus, for which he received Academy Award and Golden Globe nominations for best actor. At age 29, he won the Academy Award for best actor in The Goodbye Girl. Throughout the years of his career, Dreyfuss has made political and social activism a priority. He has campaigned for candidates and causes, advocated for national and community service before congressional committees, and worked with groups promoting solutions to the Arab/Israeli conflict. His Imagining the Future Fund brought Western and Arab journalists together to focus on broadcast media in the Middle East. Co-founder of L.A. Works, a nonprofit, public action and volunteer center in Los Angeles, he also sits on the board of the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, which built the first national museum dedicated to the U.S. Constitution and serves on the board of directors of the Los Angeles ACLU Foundation. In the late '60s and early '70s, Dreyfuss commuted between both coasts doing Broadway, off-Broadway, repertory and improvisational comedy, as well as some guest appearances on television. Dreyfuss made his motion picture debut in 1967 with a bit part in Valley of the Dolls, followed by one line in The Graduate. Several films later, in 1973, his sensitive portrayal of an ambivalent college-bound teen in the cult classic American Graffiti garnered him both praise and attention. Stellar performances followed in such films as The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, The Goodbye Girl, Mr. Holland's Opus and Sidney Lumet's Night Falls on Manhattan.

I would like to thank the American Society of International Law for asking me to convene the Fifth Annual Detlev F. Vagts Roundtable on Transnational Law. When I was chosen back in 2019, I was very pleased to learn that the Society and the Vagts family were interested in hearing about international intellectual property law. As it has turned out, that choice was prescient. Given the current pressure to find and rapidly distribute treatments and vaccines to combat the COVID-19 pandemic, intellectual property rights have become a major focus of international concern. On the one hand, these rights encourage innovation. However exclusivity can also raise costs and pose obstacles to widespread distribution of the fruits of technological progress.

Every American schoolchild knows of the crimes of Alger Hiss, a man whose very name rings with villainy. Communist, spy, perjurer - all of these accusations were bandied around in public and led to Hiss's downfall. Outside the US, Alger Hiss is less well-known, but the man who caused Hiss's downfall, Richard Nixon, became notorious because of his own crimes in government. Now, prize-winning thriller-writer Joan Brady has written a powerful book which demolishes the evidence against Hiss and shows how Nixon manipulated the press and public by forging evidence and riding roughshod over Hiss's rights. Research for her book followed a long friendship with Hiss after his release from prison, and her curiosity turned to outrage when she discovered how he had been treated. But why would Nixon rig such a case? Brady explains that he needed to establish anti-communist credentials at a time of Red-hunting hysteria in the US at the time he was standing as a right-wing candidate, and Hiss was his scapegoat, just as Alfred Dreyfus in France in 1894 was convicted of espionage on a wave of anti-semitism. Dreyfus was eventually cleared of his crimes; Alger Hiss never has been. Brady draws strong parallels with today, with the war on terrorism sometimes being used to silence or threaten critics of government policies in the US and the UK. Written in a vivid and personal style, America's Dreyfus reads like a one of Brady's thrillers, although every word is true...