Fellows honor Peter Alexander, Dawn Netsch

Peter C. Alexander, retiring dean of the Southern Illinois University School of Law, has been named the 21st recipient of the Illinois Bar Foundation Distinguished Service to Law and Society Award.

Alexander will be honored at the Fellows Award breakfast at 7:30 a.m. Friday, Dec. 12, in Ballroom II/III of the Sheraton Chicago Hotel during the ISBA Midyear Meeting.

Chicago attorney Dawn Clark Netsch, professor emerita at the Northwestern University School of Law and former Illinois comptroller, will be inducted as the 23rd Honorary Fellow of the Bar Foundation.

An undergraduate at SIU, where he was student government president in 1979, Peter Alexander returned to the Carbondale campus 24 years later, in 2003, to head its law school.

A 1983 graduate of the Northeastern University School of Law in Boston, he was a law clerk in U.S. District Court in Danville for two years before entering private practice in Champaign and later opening offices in Savoy and Watseka.

Alexander taught for awhile at Parkland Junior College before widening his legal education scope and joining the faculty at the Dickinson School of Law in 1992. During his 11 years there, he served as associate dean.

Active for years in the Illinois State Bar Association, Alexander chairs the Committee on Delivery of Legal Services and is a member of the Committee on Legal Education, Admission and Competence.

Through his efforts, the SIU law school has been a sponsor of the networking breakfast at the ISBA Annual Meeting and an alumni reception during the Midyear Meeting. He also has encouraged faculty members to become active in state bar committees and section councils.

Dawn Clark Netsch, a member of Phi Beta Kappa and first in her 1952 class at the Northwestern University School of Law, has been a faculty member since 1965.

Netsch was a delegate to the 1970 Constitutional Convention after serving on the Constitution Study Committee from 1967 to 1969. She was a member of the Illinois Senate from 1972 to 1990 and state comptroller from 1991 to 1995.

Tickets to the Fellows Award breakfast are $40 per person. Reservations should be made by Dec. 8 by contacting Elizabeth Driscoll at (312) 726-6072 or edriscoll@isba.org.