CHICAGO -- Richard N. Winfield has been elected chairman of the World Press Freedom Committee. Winfield succeeds James H. Ottaway Jr., who was chairman for 10 years.
The group, a nonprofit organization based in Washington, D.C., advocates against international restrictions on the press. Winfield was elected Sunday at the group's biennial meeting in Chicago.
Winfield served as general counsel for The Associated Press for more than three decades while a partner in the firm of Rogers & Wells, which became Clifford Chance US LLP. He retired in 2002 and began teaching courses in media law at Columbia Law School and Fordham Law School.
Since the mid-1990s Winfield has worked with the Central and East European Law Initiative, a public service project of the American Bar Association in which lawyers assist former Soviet bloc countries in writing constitutions and setting up legal systems. He also co-founded the International Senior Lawyers Project, which expanded the program to Algeria, China, Japan and Turkey.
