for the impoverished, and served as chairman of that section from 1969 to 1970. In 1973 he became the first chairman of the Commission on Mentally Disabled of the American Bar Association, where he established projects to help provide legal services and promote fights for the mentally disabled. He was chairman of ABA's Center for Human Rights. During the controversial and eventually unsuccessful Robert Bork Supreme Court nomination in 1987, Shestack was part of the association's committee on judicial appointments and was one of the minority report members who gave Bork a "not qualified" assessment. Shestack also gained some notoriety in 1992, during a controversy wherein the ABA refused to let Vice President and lawyer Dan Quayle speak at its national convention, when he said that Quayle would have been invited had he been a person of "personal stature or legal ability". Shestack later acknowledged the remark had been disrespectful of Quayle's office. He longed to serve as president of the ABA, and finally did so from 1997 to 1998. At one time he had been considered too radical to hold the post, but the ABA's political drift aligned more with him. As president of the ABA, Shestack focused on increasing professionalism within the bar, established a high level commission to review and revise the bar's model code of ethics, and initiated an ethical rule regarding pay-to-play. He convened the first ABA conferences on racism and mental health as well as the first ABA Conference on Human Rights at the U.N. Shestack served as chair of the American Poetry Center and as director of the American Poetry Review, which awards a prize in his honor. He was President of the Jewish Publication Society of America, served on the board of directors of Tel Aviv University, Hebrew University, the American Jewish Congress, the American Jewish Committee, and served as president of Har Zion Temple, then Philadelphia's largest Conservative Jewish congregation. He was a member of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Council and Chairman of that institution's Committee on Conscience. In Philadelphia, he was often known as "Mr. Marciarose", due to the fame of his wife. The couple had two children: Jennifer Shestack Doss, a fragrance buyer for Bergdorf Goodman, and motion picture producer Jonathan Shestack, as well as five grandchildren. The couple became active in Cure Autism Now after one of their grandchildren was discovered to be afflicted. His most