San Francisco - (March 26, 2004) - The Board of Regents of the American College of Consumer Financial Services Lawyers has announced that it unanimously voted to award its highest award, the Senator William Proxmire Lifetime Achievement Award, to Roland E. Brandel. This is only the fifth time the award has been made. Mr. Brandel is currently Senior Counsel at Morrison & Foerster LLP in San Francisco, California. Mr. Brandel has long been a national figure in consumer financial services. He was involved in the original organization of what is now MasterCard and has represented many of the major financial service companies in connection with retail banking issues.
Mr. Brandel is the author of six books and numerous leading articles in the consumer financial services field and has been active in numerous legal and community organizations. Among his activities, Mr. Brandel was a Visiting Professor of Law at Boalt Hall, the University of California at Berkeley; on the Visiting Committees for the University of Chicago and Golden Gate University Law Schools; Chairman of the San Francisco Committee on Foreign Relations; and Chairman of Berkeley's Waterfront Advisory Board.
According to Marcia Z. Sullivan, the Director of Government Relations at the Consumer Bankers Association in Washington, D.C.:
"Roland Brandel is and has been for many years an intellectual leader in the consumer financial services area of jurisprudence and has been central in formulating an area of law that became its own area of jurisprudence only about 40 years ago."
The award is to be presented to Mr. Brandel at a black tie dinner of the American College in Seattle on April 3. The award includes a cash donation component, which Mr. Brandel has directed to the California Reinvestment Committee (CRC). The CRC was organized in 1986 by an ad-hoc group of nonprofit community developers and organizations for the purpose of leveraging the federal Community Reinvestment Act to increase the flow of credit and investments into California's low-income communities and communities of color.
Founded in 1994, the American College of Consumer Financial Services Lawyers is a professional association of lawyers dedicated to the improvement and enhancement of the skill and practice of consumer financial services law and the ethics of the profession. Membership in the College is limited to lawyers who have achieved preeminence in the field and who have made repeated and substantial contributions to the promotion of learning and scholarship through teaching, lecturing and published writings.