A significant gift from a Cornell Law School alumnus has helped transform an ordinary classroom in Myron Taylor Hall into a fully wired and equipped high-tech facility.

The Harriet Stein Mancuso '73 Amphitheater will be formally dedicated Nov. 13 at 12:15 p.m. at a special ceremony honoring its benefactor, Robert Mancuso and his late wife, Harriet Stein Mancuso, both J.D. '73, and the facility's new capabilities will be demonstrated.

The Law School's largest classroom, the Mancuso amphitheater, G90 Myron Taylor Hall, seats about 150 people. The renovated room is now linked to the school's computer network and Legal Information Institute (LII) as well as to the Internet, and desks are equipped for students' laptop computers and other electronic equipment. The room also is wired and equipped for distance-learning teleconferences and video and audio recording. There are microphones throughout the amphitheater to pick up comments from students, seminar participants and speakers. An array of wall-mounted cameras and a touchpad on a console at the front of the classroom allow presenters to project computer-based documents and images onto a large screen, adjust the lighting in the room, and record and videotape the presentation. A "cameraman presenter" camera with an integrated wireless tracking system can photograph speakers as they move around the room. And the amphitheater's new sound system accommodates the hearing impaired with four special infrared headsets.

"We are extremely grateful to Robert Mancuso for his generosity and farsightedness," said Dean Lee Teitelbaum. "His gift enables us to extend the boundaries of learning far beyond the walls of Myron Taylor Hall. This marvelous amphitheater will forever remind the Cornell Law School community and all who visit of our treasured alumna Harriet Stein Mancuso."

While the Law School's technical staff plan to teach faculty members how to use the new equipment, Law School Professor Bob Green got a head start last week when he tried out the amphitheater for his Federal Income Tax class. "I was able to link to my office computer and show documents with mathematical examples on the classroom's large screen," he said. "Everything worked perfectly and was fairly easy to operate, and the figures could be seen clearly even with the lights on and the window shades up," a definite advantage when students are taking notes. Next semester Green hopes to use the room's interactive equipment to link students on campus with guest speakers in New York City for his class on Taxation of Financial Instruments.

Peter Martin, the Jane M.G. Foster Professor of Law and co-director of LII, the most-visited noncommercial legal research web site in the world, plans to use the renovated amphitheater to link his classes to relevant Internet-based sites. "Several weeks ago, my class discussion of copyright infringement liability began with a streaming video of the oral argument before the U.S. Court of Appeals in the Napster case, which had taken place only days before and was available from the C-SPAN web site. The renovation and upgrade of this classroom makes that kind of enrichment feasible without special setup or awkward compromises between lighting needed for discussion and note-taking and legible projected images." Martin also hopes that the facility's teleconferencing capabilities will be used to extend the classroom to students outside Myron Taylor Hall and even beyond Cornell.

In an added touch, to emphasize the connection between the state-of-the-art facility and the age-old study of law, the hallway leading to the Mancuso amphitheater will be lined with plaster-cast replicas of the entire Code of Gortyn, a law code found on an ancient wall in Crete that was likely part of a law court in the fifth century before the Christian era. The code forbids murder, theft and assault. The copy was brought to Ithaca in the 1880s by Andrew Dickson White, Cornell's first president, and most recently has been in the care of Professor Peter Ian Kuniholm of Cornell's Department of Art History, who arranged for its exhibition at the Law School.