Maurice Rosenberg, a pathbreaking legal scholar whose career was dedicated to promoting judicial reform in the United States and a faculty member at Columbia University School of Law for 39 years, died today (Friday, Aug. 25) at his home in White Plains, N.Y. He was 75.

The cause was a progressive neurological disease, said Dr. Richard Rosenberg, his son.

Professor Rosenberg, the Harold R. Medina Professor of Procedural Jurisprudence Emeritus, engaged throughout his career in a variety of public enterprises to improve the administration of justice, particularly by upgrading the quality of the personnel and processes available to the courts, and he wrote and lectured extensively for that purpose. He pioneered empirical studies on the workings of legal rules and institutions that greatly broadened the parameters of legal scholarship. His studies on pre-trial discovery and the pre-trial conference helped shape and determine their role and function.

He served as head of the Advisory Council on Appellate Justice (1971-75), seeking ways to deal with the rising tide of cases inundating the appellate courts, and on the Council on the Role of the Courts (1978-80). He was a special assistant to the U.S. Attorney General in 1976-77 and, by appointment of President Carter, was Assistant Attorney General from 1979 to 1981, heading the Office for Improvements in the Administration of Justice. He was appointed in 1980 by Chief Justice Warren Burger to the Federal Advisory Committee on Rules of Civil Procedure and served in that capacity until 1987. He was a member of the Mayor of New York City's Committee on the Judiciary from 1962 to 1977.

A native of Oswego, N.Y., Maurice Rosenberg was born Sept. 3, 1919. He received the B.A. from Syracuse University in 1940 and entered Columbia Law School. He volunteered for the Army in 1941 and served in Europe until 1945, assigned to a variety of duties. With the military government in occupied Germany, he helped repatriate millions of slave laborers conscripted by the Germans from their conquered territories--Italy, Yugoslavia, Belgium, France and Poland. When he returned to Columbia in 1946, he completed his studies in one year in an accelerated post-war program, graduating with honors. He was editor in chief of Columbia Law Review.

Following law school, he clerked for two years for Judge Stanley H. Fuld of the New York Court of Appeals. He then spent nearly six years in practice in New York City, mainly on federal trials and appeals, with Cravath, Swaine and Moore and Austrian, Lance and Stewart.

Appointed to the Columbia law faculty as associate professor in 1956 and promoted to professor with tenure in 1958, he was named Nash Professor of Law in 1970 and to the newly created Medina chair in 1973. He was designated Medina Professor Emeritus in 1990 upon his retirement. He was a special lecturer in law through 1993.

Professor Rosenberg was director for eight years, until 1964, of the Columbia University Project for Effective Justice, which performed research to improve the administration of civil justice, and he was executive director of the Walter E. Meyer Institute of Law at Columbia from 1965 to 1970.

The Project for Effective Justice undertook several important studies. Among the largest was a study of the effectiveness of the pretrial conference in New Jersey court procedure, the first, official controlled test of procedure ever attempted in American courts. The study had far-reaching influence in court procedure throughout the country, and its findings were published by Professor Rosenberg (with Paul Carrington and Daniel Meador) in book form in 1964 by Columbia University Press as "The Pretrial Conference and Effective Justice." A grant from the American Bar Association aided in its distribution to judges of Federal courts of the United States and the judges of major state trial courts throughout the nation.

He was the author of some 70 articles on problems of the courts, civil procedure and conflict of laws and author, co-author or editor of eight books, among them "Elements of Civil Procedure" (with Harold Korn and Hans Smit, 4th edition 1985), "Conflict of Laws" (with William Reese; 8th edition 1984), and "Appellate Justice in New York."

He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a fellow of the Institute of Judicial Administration and of the American Bar Foundation, and a trustee of the Practicing Law Institute. He served as president of the Association of American Law Schools and vice president and director of the American Judicature Society. He was a visiting professor at Harvard Law School in 1969-70, a fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford in 1978-79, and a lecturer at numerous institutions in this country and abroad. He was a consultant to the Ford Foundation and the Carnegie Commission on Science, Technology and Government.

Among awards he received are the Justice Award of the American Judicature Society, the Award for Outstanding Research in Law and Government from the Fellows of the American Bar Foundation, and the Medal for Excellence from Columbia Law School.

Professor Rosenberg is survived by his wife, Gloria; two sons, David of Pittsburgh and Richard of Morristown, N.J.; Jason, child of their late daughter, Joan; and four other grandchildren.

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