Two AEI friends were recently honored at the White House. Adjunct scholar Gary S. Becker, a Nobel laureate in economics and professor at the University of Chicago, was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor, on November 5. AEI trustee Roger Hertog was awarded a National Humanities Medal on November 15. Hertog is a distinguished philanthropist who supports numerous artistic and cultural enterprises, including the work of Leon R. Kass, M.D., AEI's Hertog Fellow.

British prime minister Gordon Brown is a fan of Gertrude Himmelfarb, who serves on AEI's Council of Academic Advisers. Brown has written the introduction to a British edition of her book The Roads to Modernity: The British, French, and American Enlightenments, which will appear in March. Two recent profiles in the Times of London and the Independent describe the prime minister's interest in her work. According to the Independent, Brown "promised her she can have a launch party for the new volume at No. 10 [Downing Street]," if she would like one.

Resident Fellow Alex J. Pollock

In the summer, Alex J. Pollock testified in favor of simple and clear mortgage disclosure requirements before the District of Columbia Council. Last month, the Council passed a law requiring a one-page disclosure form modeled on the one Pollock designed in response to the collapse of the housing bubble (PDF).

Roger Bate's March 2007 Health Policy Outlook criticized the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria for allowing "monotherapies" for malaria to be purchased by the U.S. government, thus "instigating the rise of drug resistance." After several months of criticism from Bate and other watchdogs, the Fund quietly pulled twenty poorly formulated malaria drugs from its compliance list this autumn.

Antonin Scalia and Walter Berns at the first Federalist Society conference at Yale University in 1982

In November, the Federalist Society celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary. The organization has been very influential in legal debates since its founding. Many of the participants in the organization's first conference have long-time associations with AEI, including Walter Berns, Judge Robert Bork, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, and Judge Ralph Winter. The Society is releasing an anniversary volume, edited by Northwestern University law professor and AEI alumnus Steven G. Calebresi, entitled Originalism: A Quarter Century of Debate (Regnery).

Daniel C. Searle

AEI mourns the loss of Daniel C. Searle, a great benefactor and friend of the Institute who died on October 30. Searle founded the Searle Freedom Trust, through which he provided funding over many years for AEI's work on tax and entitlement reform, deregulation, legal policy, and culture and social welfare issues. Searle also underwrote AEI's National Research Initiative, which supports university-based academics and freelance intellectuals around the country. "In his devotion to individual liberty, personal responsibility, and policy reform; in his tremendous generosity in both spirit and deed; and in his demanding standards of ethics and excellence in everything he did and supported, Dan was in a class of his own," said AEI president Christopher DeMuth. "His sterling legacy will continue at the Searle Freedom Trust and also at AEI--firmly guided by the Trust's mission statement, which he wrote with great care, and by the memory of his forceful character and intellect and love of the well-considered life."