Lecture Programs and Other Academic Opportunities
The regular curriculum at Yale Law School is augmented by a host of events that enrich legal education and scholarship. Distinguished speakers—lawyers, judges, public figures, government officials, scholars, and other prominent individuals—are invited by faculty members, student organizations, and academic programs within the School to give talks or participate in panel discussions on a wide variety of topics throughout the year. Conferences sponsored or cosponsored by the School or by its faculty or students address issues of legal import both here and abroad. Additionally, an abundant resource of endowed funds allows the School to invite many specially designated fellows who not only give lectures but also spend time mentoring students with similar academic or professional interests.
Lecture Programs
A sampling of the endowed lecture programs from the 2011–2012 academic year follows:
The Robert P. Anderson Memorial Lecture provides a forum for distinguished judges to speak on matters of general importance to law and society. Renowned human rights activist and former South Africa Constitutional Court Justice Albie Sachs gave the Anderson Lecture on the topic “The Judge Who Cried: Social and Economic Rights as Judicially Enforceable Fundamental Rights.”
The Judge Jon O. Newman Lectureship supports an annual lecture in global justice, or public international, human rights, or comparative law, by a distinguished individual who is not a citizen of, and does not reside in, the United States. This year’s Newman Lecture was given by former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who spoke about faith, globalization, security, and constitutional reform in Great Britain.
The Robert H. Preiskel and Leon Silverman Program on the Practicing Lawyer and the Public Interest sponsors lectures and other events celebrating private lawyers’ contributions to the public interest. Attorney P. Sabin Willett of the Boston law firm Bingham McCutchen LLP gave a talk titled “Your Guantánamo Moment” at the 2011–2012 Preiskel Silverman Lecture.
The John R. Raben/Sullivan & Cromwell Fellowship brings to the Law School a leading expert in securities law or accounting for business enterprises to deliver a public lecture. H. Rodgin Cohen, senior chairman and partner at Sullivan & Cromwell LLP, gave this year’s Raben/Sullivan & Cromwell Fellowship Lecture on “The Financial Crisis and the Regulatory Response.”
The Storrs Lectures, established in 1889, constitute one of Yale Law School’s oldest and most prestigious lecture programs. They are given annually by a prominent scholar who discusses fundamental problems of law and jurisprudence. Professor Saskia Sassen of Columbia University gave the 2012 Storrs Lectures on “The Making of New Bordering Capabilities” and “Ungoverned Territories or New Types of Rights and Authority?”
The James A. Thomas Lectures are given by scholars whose work addresses the concerns of communities or groups currently marginalized within the legal academy or society at large. Harvard professor Annette Gordon-Reed delivered the 2011–2012 Thomas Lecture, speaking on the topic “Slavery and Race: Monticello Legacies.”
The Judge Ralph K. Winter Lectureship on Corporate Law and Governance supports lectures on corporate law and governance and related topics. MIT professor Stephen A. Ross delivered a Winter Lecture titled “Regression to the Max: The Use and Abuse of Financial Theory in Legal Disputes and Regulation.”
Other named lecture and fellowship programs at Yale Law School include the following:
The Timothy B. Atkeson Environmental Practitioner in Residence Program brings to the Law School practitioners from a variety of environmental law practice settings to lecture, teach seminars, and counsel students on career opportunities.
The Robert L. Bernstein Fellowships in International Human Rights are awarded annually to two Yale Law School graduates pursuing projects devoted to the advancement of human rights around the world.
The Robert M. Cover Lectureship in Law and Religion brings speakers to Yale to explore the historical, philosophical, sociological, and literary intersections between law and religion.
The Ralph Gregory Elliot First Amendment Lectureship provides for lectures, preferably on an annual basis, on some aspect of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
The John Hart Ely Fellowship Lecture on Professional Responsibility highlights research and teaching in the field of ethics and professional responsibility.
The Fowler Harper Memorial Fund and Fellowship brings to Yale Law School a prominent person who has made a distinguished contribution to the public life of the nation.
The Samuel and Ronnie ’72 Heyman Lecture on Public Service is part of a gift that also supports the Heyman Federal Public Service Fellowship Program.
The Kronman-Postol Lectureship supports lectures related to law and the humanities.
The Arthur Allen Leff Fellowship brings to Yale Law School individuals whose work in other disciplines illuminates the study of law and legal institutions.
The Charles S. Mechem, Jr. Fellowship provides for lectures and other presentations by senior corporate executives to foster an understanding of decision making in the business environment.
The Sherrill Lectureship brings distinguished visitors with special expertise in problems of international law and international relations.
Beyond the endowed lecture and fellowship programs, other invited speakers present topics of particular interest to the Law School community. Among those invited in the 2011–2012 academic year were Retired Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, who served as a judge for the Thurman Arnold Prize Finals of the Morris Tyler Moot Court of Appeals; the Honorable Jeh Charles Johnson, General Counsel of the Department of Defense, who visited the Law School in the fall to talk about “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” and in the spring to talk about “National Security Law, Lawyers, and Lawyering in the Obama Administration”; and University of Southern California professor Gideon Daniel Yaffe, who discussed “Criminal Responsibility & Neuroscience: The Absurd, the Overstated, and the Potentially Useful (someday, maybe).”
Other special guest lecturers included Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and best-selling author Ron Suskind, delivering a talk about “Washington, Wall Street, and the Struggle to Restore Confidence in America’s Future”; and human rights activist and Enough Project cofounder John Prendergast, who gave talks titled “Why Somalia is Starving and What To Do About It” and “South Sudan’s Success and Darfur’s Failure and the Implications of the Arab Spring for Sudan.” U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas ’74 visited as a guest of the Yale Law School Federalist Society and Black Law Students Association; and former secretary of state Dr. Henry Kissinger met with the Yale Law Foreign Policy Workshop and addressed students from the Law School and the Jackson Institute for Global Affairs in a “Special Conversation on Sino-America Relations.”
In addition, many student organizations and Law School centers sponsored lectures and conferences throughout the academic year, including The Yale Journal of International Law and the Yale Law & Policy Review. Other notable conferences included the fifteenth annual Arthur Liman Public Interest Law Colloquium on the topic “Accessing Justice, Rationing Law”; the eighteenth annual Rebellious Lawyering Conference; and the Yale Human Rights and Development Law Journal’s biannual symposium, “States, Minds, and States of Mind: Mental Health as a Human Right.” The Yale Environmental Law Association and Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy cosponsored “New Directions in Environmental Law: [Re]Claiming Accountability.” And the Yale Law School Chapter of the American Constitution Society, Yale Law Women, and Yale Law Journal cohosted a conference on the Violence Against Women Act.
Other regularly scheduled talks focus on a specific academic or intellectual interest. The Orville H. Schell, Jr. Center for International Human Rights sponsors a weekly Human Rights Workshop for students, scholars, and practitioners in the field. The Information Society Project hosts a weekly Thomson Reuters Speaker Series presenting leading scholars and practitioners in law, technology, ethics, information policy, and intellectual property who discuss their research and the latest news and trends impacting the information society. The Yale Law School Center for the Study of Corporate Law sponsors the Bert W. Wasserman Workshop in Law and Finance for the presentation of research and discussion of topical issues in law and finance by faculty from Yale and other universities. The China Center organizes a weekly workshop on Chinese Legal Reform, in which U.S. and Chinese scholars present papers on Chinese legal and policy developments. The Legal Theory Workshop brings to the Law School provocative new scholarship from law and affiliated disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. The Legal History Forum brings together law students, graduate students, and scholars from a variety of disciplines who have an interest in history and the law. The Law, Economics, and Organization Workshop is an interdisciplinary workshop that brings to Yale Law School social scientists and legal scholars, generally from other universities, whose research involves a broad range of issues. Yale Law School also sponsors a series of workshops on dispute resolution with the Quinnipiac University School of Law.
Special Initiatives
Yale Law School is shaped by the intellectual interests of its faculty and students. Those interests find expression not only in the established curriculum and other academic opportunities, but also in new activities that emerge from time to time.
For example, the growing importance of international perspectives has yielded several major initiatives. The Global Constitutionalism Seminar is an annual event in which Supreme Court and constitutional court judges from around the world meet with faculty members to discuss issues of common concern.
A second initiative is designed to strengthen democratic institutions and practices in Latin America through linkage activities with two law schools in Chile, one in Argentina, and two in Brazil. This program permits Yale students to spend a month in Chile, Argentina, or Brazil, in order to work with Latin American law students in small study groups and clinics. In the spring, students from the Latin American linkage law schools visit Yale for three weeks to participate in study groups and attend classes. In addition, legal scholars from throughout Latin America, the Caribbean Basin, Spain, and the United States meet in June for the Seminario en Latinoamérica de Teoría Constitucional y Política (SELA), a three-day seminar exploring the foundational ideas of constitutional democracy. SELA is cosponsored by Yale and a number of other law schools in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Paraguay, Peru, Puerto Rico, and Spain.
A similar initiative, the Middle East Legal Studies Seminar, is an annual meeting convened by the Law School in a Middle East country or nearby venue. It was created to provide a forum in which influential scholars and opinion leaders from the legal communities of the Middle East could exchange ideas and form productive working relationships. Every year, roughly fifty lawyers, judges, and academics from the region meet with Yale professors and students to discuss an agreed-upon topic of common importance. Recent topics have included the concept of political legitimacy, history and identity, and exceptionality in the Middle East.
The Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy
The Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy, a joint undertaking with the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies, seeks to incorporate fresh thinking, ethical awareness, and analytically rigorous decision-making tools into environmental law and policy. In addition to its research activities, the center also aims to serve as a locus for connection and collaboration by all members of the Yale University community who are interested in environmental law and policy issues. The center supports a wide-ranging program of teaching, research, and outreach on local, regional, national, and global pollution control and natural resource management issues. These efforts involve faculty, staff, and student collaboration and are aimed at shaping academic thinking and policy making in the public, private, and NGO sectors. The center is focused on three program areas and an environmental protection clinic: the Environmental Performance Measurement program aims to encourage environmental policy making that uses data-driven indicators and statistics. The program’s primary product is the biennial Environmental Performance Index, which ranks countries on performance indicators tracked across policy categories covering both environmental public health and ecosystem vitality. The Environmental Law and Governance program seeks to reinvigorate environmental law and policy discussions by offering novel theoretical and empirical insights on cost-benefit analysis, the precautionary principle, sustainable development, and other foundational concepts and tools of environmental regulation. The Innovation and Environment program explores creative public policy tactics for addressing environmental issues, with a focus on policy incentives that drive private-sector innovation in renewable energy development, energy efficiency, and other areas critical to sustainability.
The center coordinates an Environmental Protection Clinic that undertakes long-term projects for clients (environmental groups, government agencies, community organizations, and private sector enterprises) and is staffed by interdisciplinary teams of law and environmental studies students. Projects include legislative drafting, litigation, multiparty negotiation, and policy development, and focus on topics including environmental justice, sustainable agriculture, and global warming.
For information on the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy, visit http://envirocenter.research.yale.edu.
The Yale Center for Law and Philosophy
The Yale Center for Law and Philosophy was founded in 2005 as a joint venture of the Law School and the Yale Philosophy department. It aims to encourage advanced work, including research degrees, at the interface of philosophy and law. Members of both faculties are affiliated with the center, as are a number of visitors. The center’s programs include regular workshops and conferences, attracting leading philosophers of law from around the world. The center also supports a postdoctoral fellowship, which provides substantial funding for research. The center also helps to coordinate courses across the Law School and the Philosophy department. More information is available on the center’s Web site at www.law.yale.edu/yclp.
The Kauffman Program in Law, Economics, and Entrepreneurship
The Kauffman Program in Law, Economics, and Entrepreneurship is supported by a grant from the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation. The Kauffman Program supports the work of a faculty member appointed Kauffman Research Scholar in Law, Economics, and Entrepreneurship, and provides support for Kauffman Term-Time Student Fellows and for the Kauffman Colloquium on Entrepreneurship and Economic Growth. The program also supports a limited number of Summer Research Fellowships on topics of law, economics, and entrepreneurship, and a special program devoted to considering how the law school curriculum (and law and economics) can more centrally emphasize the effect of law on economic growth. During 2011–2012, Professor George L. Priest served as the Kauffman Research Scholar.
The John M. Olin Center for Studies in Law, Economics, and Public Policy
The Olin Center for Studies in Law, Economics, and Public Policy is designed to facilitate the scholarly interests of the many distinguished law and economics scholars at Yale, including Professors Ackerman, Ayres, Brooks, Calabresi, Ellickson, Hansmann, Jolls, Klevorick, Kronman, Listokin, Macey, Markovits, Mashaw, C. Priest, G. Priest, Romano, Rose, Rose-Ackerman, Schuck, Schwartz, and Winter. The center supports the Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization; a Working Paper Series; and the Law, Economics, and Organization Workshop, at which scholars from other institutions and from Yale present papers for student and faculty criticism. The center also provides an umbrella for two programs: the Program in Civil Liability, established to promote comprehensive reanalysis of the modern law of torts, products liability, professional malpractice, insurance, and other subjects related to our civil liability system; and the Program for Studies in Capitalism, which supports research on the operation of capitalism as a mechanism of economic growth; the ethical bases of capitalism; and the relation between capitalism and the poor, and between capitalism and democracy. The center’s codirectors are Professors George L. Priest and Susan Rose-Ackerman.
The Yale Law School Center for the Study of Corporate Law
The Yale Law School Center for the Study of Corporate Law was established in 1999 to promote teaching and research in the business law area. The center’s focus of study is wide-ranging, reflecting the shifting priorities of the business and regulatory environment. It includes corporate and commercial law and the law of other nongovernmental organizations; the regulation of financial markets and intermediaries; the legal framework of finance, including the law of bankruptcy and corporate reorganization; and antitrust law and the law of regulated industries.
The center hosts annually the Weil, Gotshal & Manges Roundtable, a one-day event on the issues of the day, and two endowed lectures, the John R. Raben/Sullivan & Cromwell Fellowship Lecture and the Judge Ralph K. Winter Lectureship on Corporate Law and Governance. Throughout the academic year, the center sponsors the Bert W. Wasserman Workshop in Law and Finance, which invites scholars from other universities to present their current research. In addition, the center organizes breakfast panel programs for alumni in New York City, occasional lectures, panels, and symposia at the Law School, along with a number of career development presentations for students, which are cosponsored with the Law School’s Career Development Office and the Law and Business Society. In the spring term, the center sponsors the Marvin A. Chirelstein Colloquium on Contemporary Issues in Law and Business. The colloquium is a limited-enrollment seminar that seeks to convey to students the variety of career opportunities in the private sector through weekly presentations by distinguished alumni.
Professor Roberta Romano is the center’s director. Natalya Shnitser and Andrew Verstein are the John R. Raben/Sullivan & Cromwell executive directors. The center has a board of advisers, chaired by Robert Todd Lang ’47. Faculty members serving on the center’s executive committee are Ian Ayres, Richard Brooks, Henry Hansmann, Christine Jolls, Alvin Klevorick, Anthony Kronman, John Langbein, Yair Listokin, Jonathan Macey, Daniel Markovits, Noah Messing, Robert Post, George Priest, and Alan Schwartz.
For additional information on the center’s upcoming and past activities, the business law curriculum at the Law School, and joint-degree programs with the School of Management, including the three-year J.D.-M.B.A. degree program, visit the center’s Web site at www.law.yale.edu/ccl.
The China Center
The China Center is the primary home for activities related to China at the Law School. The cornerstone of these activities is the China Law Center, established in 1999. The China Law Center is a unique institution dedicated to helping promote China’s legal reforms and increasing understanding of China in the United States. In interaction with research and teaching, the core of the center’s work is designing and carrying out sustained, in-depth cooperative projects between U.S. and Chinese experts on key issues in Chinese law and policy reform, with the goal of having a positive impact on China’s reform process. Cooperative projects have focused particularly on issues of judicial reform, criminal justice reform, administrative and regulatory reform, constitutional law, legal education, and public interest law. Projects involve a range of activities, including workshops and seminars in the United States and China, research visits to Yale and to China, and books or articles by Chinese or U.S. scholars.
In recent years, the China Center has expanded its work to issues of U.S.-China relations more generally. The focal point of this activity is a Track II Dialogue on U.S.-China Relations that is chaired on the U.S. side by center director Paul Gewirtz. The center also undertakes research related to U.S.-China relations, invites fellows and speakers on this subject, and collaborates with others within Yale University undertaking work on U.S.-China relations.
The center involves Yale Law School students in all aspects of its work. Students have conducted research and prepared reports, worked with Chinese visiting scholars and lawyers in residence at Yale, organized and attended workshops in China and at Yale, and worked during the summer in a variety of Chinese institutions, including academic centers and nongovernmental organizations.
In at least one semester each year, the center hosts a weekly Workshop on Chinese Legal Reform. The workshop provides students and faculty an opportunity to learn about the Chinese legal and political system through discussions of papers presented by center staff, visiting Chinese scholars, and distinguished guest speakers (both Chinese and American). The workshop has become an intellectual center for convergence within Yale Law School—and increasingly within Yale University as a whole—for faculty and students with an interest in China and issues related to legal and policy reforms in China.
Professor Paul Gewirtz is the director of the China Center. Senior Research Scholar and Lecturer in Law Jamie Horsley is the executive director of the China Law Center. More information about the center is available on its Web site, www.yale.edu/chinalaw.
The Information Society Project
The Information Society Project (ISP) at Yale Law School was created in 1997 to study the implications of the Internet, telecommunications, and the new information technologies for law and society. It is the umbrella program for related organizations, including the Knight Law and Media Program, the Abrams Institute for Freedom of Expression, and the Program for Reproductive Justice. Much of the ISP’s work has focused on issues of freedom of speech, democracy, globalization, access to knowledge, and the growth and spread of culture on the Internet. In past years ISP has studied the free speech implications of filtering and rating systems, legal protections for privacy and sensitive information on the Internet, democracy and civic participation in cyberspace, the civil liberties implications of telecommunications design and intellectual property protection, biotechnology and access to medicines, and memetics and the evolution of cultures and ideologies. The ISP has held scholarly conferences on a range of subjects including global censorship; access to knowledge; the Internet and globalization; democracy in cyberspace; blogging and Internet journalism; the law of virtual worlds; and emerging issues in cybercrime and cybersecurity. The project embraces a variety of activities, including fellowships for young scholars; publication of academic and policy papers; and advice and education for policy makers, business leaders, nonprofit organizations, and the legal community. Professor Jack Balkin is the director and founder, and Margot Kaminski ’10 is the executive director. Additional information on the ISP is available on its Web site, www.law.yale.edu/isp.
The Arthur Liman Public Interest Program
The Arthur Liman Public Interest Program was established in 1997 by family and friends of the late Arthur Liman ’57 to honor his commitment to public interest law. The program is supported today by many others, who share these commitments.
The Liman Program sponsors workshops, colloquia, programs, and research and advocacy projects for current law students. The weekly Liman workshop considered abolition movements in fall 2011 and the constitutional entitlements to access to justice in spring 2012. The Liman Program also provides fellowships for Yale Law School graduates working in the public sector, and it helps to support summer fellowships for students at Barnard, Brown, Harvard, Princeton, Spelman, and Yale.
Through the Law School postgraduate fellowships, the Liman Program funds graduates to do full-time work in an ongoing or start-up project devoted to the public interest. Examples include work on behalf of workfare recipients, criminal defendants, prisoners, persons with disabilities, migrant workers, the elderly, and immigrants. Including the 2012–2013 awards, the Liman Program has supported eighty-six fellows at nearly seventy public interest organizations.
Both fellows and current law students participate in workshops as well as plan the annual Liman Colloquium, which over the years has addressed “The Future of Legal Services,” “Valuing Low-Wage Workers,” “Welfare ‘Reform’ and Response,” “Encountering the Criminal Justice System,” “Portraying the Public Interest,” “Public Interest Lawyering in an Era of High Anxiety,” “Organizing, Reorganizing: Public Interest in Individual and Global Contexts,” “Liman at the Local Level: Public Interest Advocacy and American Federalism,” “Forty Years of Clinical Education at Yale: Generating Rights, Remedies, and Legal Services,” and “Imprisoned.” In March 2012, the colloquium—“Accessing Justice, Rationing Law”—brought chief justices from Alabama, California, Connecticut, Indiana, New York, and Texas to discuss the challenges of meeting the demand for legal services, especially by the poor. Also joining were experts in sociology, psychology, comparative law, and economics, as well as more than sixty returning Liman Fellows, many of whom have dedicated their careers to expanding access to justice.
Since its establishment, the range of programs funded by the Arthur Liman Public Interest Program has reflected the breadth of interests, concerns, and commitments of Arthur Liman. While working as a partner at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton and Garrison, and providing counsel to a range of corporate and individual clients, Liman also led several major institutions devoted to providing services to those who could not afford lawyers, including the Legal Aid Society of New York; the Legal Action Center; the Vera Institute for Justice; Neighborhood Defender Services of Harlem; and the New York State Capital Defenders Office. He also was chief counsel to the New York State Special Commission on Attica Prison and special counsel to the United States Senate Committee Investigating Secret Military Assistance to Iran and the Nicaraguan Opposition.
The Arthur Liman Professor of Law is Judith Resnik. The director of the Liman Program is Hope Metcalf.
The Orville H. Schell, Jr. Center for International Human Rights
The Orville H. Schell, Jr. Center for International Human Rights was established at Yale Law School in 1989 to honor Orville Schell, a distinguished New York City lawyer and partner at Hughes, Hubbard & Reed, who was vice chairman of Helsinki Watch and chairman of Americas Watch from its founding in 1981 until his death in 1987. The Schell Center provides a forum for international human rights practitioners to consider the theoretical issues their work entails and for scholars studying human rights to engage in interdisciplinary dialogue. At the same time, it offers law students and graduates diverse opportunities to apply the lessons they have learned in the classroom to further the cause of human rights. In addressing these needs, the Schell Center seeks to increase knowledge and understanding of international human rights issues; to equip lawyers and other professionals with the knowledge and skills needed to advance the cause of international human rights; and to assist human rights organizations.
The Schell Center conducts the Allard K. Lowenstein International Human Rights Clinic every term and supports the Law School’s student human rights organization, the Lowenstein International Human Rights project. It provides a number of fellowship opportunities for summer and postgraduate human rights experience and for carrying out scholarship while in residence at the Law School. The center also supports the Yale Human Rights and Development Law Journal and student projects related to human rights.
Throughout the academic year, the Schell Center sponsors frequent lectures, panels, symposia, and informal discussions on a wide range of human rights issues. In 2012, the center’s annual conference, the Robert L. Bernstein International Human Rights Fellowship Symposium, was “Human Rights and Political Change in the Arab World.”
During 2011–2012, speakers at the center’s biweekly Human Rights Workshop: Current Issues and Events included advocates from human rights organizations, scholars, and journalists. They spoke on such topics as “Fortress, Europe: Migration Controls and Access to Asylum in the European Union,” “Prosecuting Khmer Rouge Mass Atrocities at the ECCC,” “Speaking Truth to Reconciliation: Forgiveness, Resentment, Human Rights,” “Between Rhetoric and Rights: Political Prisoners, Ethnic Conflict, and Reform in Burma,” “Mineral Trade and Conflict in the Congo—Can Corporate Due Diligence Reduce Violence?,” and “Military Outsourcing: The Limits of Contract Law.” Former Constitutional Court Justice Albie Sachs of South Africa spoke on “Art, History, and Justice: The Court Built in the Heart of the Prison Where Gandhi and Mandela Were Locked Up.”
Last year, the Schell Center, often in collaboration with other centers and organizations at the University, sponsored many talks by human rights advocates and scholars, including a number of former Yale Law School students. They addressed such topics as “The War on Drugs in Mexico: What, Who, and Why Are We Fighting?,” “Why Somalia Is Starving and What to Do about It,” and “South Sudan’s Success and Darfur’s Failure and the Implications of the Arab Spring for Sudan.” Sir Nigel Rodley gave a talk on “UN Human Rights Treaty Bodies: A Suitable Case for Treatment.” The center also screened the film Nuremberg: Its Lesson for Today, with a discussion led by the film’s producer.
As it does each year, the Schell Center held a human rights career panel and sponsored several panels of Kirby Simon Summer Human Rights Fellows, who spoke about their experience and the issues raised by their summer work.
The Robert L. Bernstein Fellowship in International Human Rights, inaugurated in 1997, funds several recent Yale Law School graduates annually for a year of full-time human rights advocacy work. In 2011–2012, Bernstein Fellows worked with the Iraqi Refugee Assistance Project in Egypt, combining direct legal representation of refugees with legal research and fact-finding to support advocacy for a U.S. policy enabling women at risk to be eligible for expedited resettlement; with Project Concern International (PCI) on integrated community-based child protection in Haiti; at the Resettlement Legal Aid Project in Egypt, providing assistance to refugees in need of resettlement; and at Interights, the International Centre for the Legal Protection of Human Rights, in London, supporting litigation on the rights of women, sexual minorities, and people with disabilities in Africa and Europe.
The Robina Foundation Human Rights Fellowship also funds recent Yale Law School graduates to do full-time human rights work, particularly with appropriate international or foreign courts and tribunals and intergovernmental and governmental human rights agencies. The 2011–2012 Robina Fellows worked as: an assistant to the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food; a clerk in the chambers of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia; a prosecutorial intern at the International Criminal Court; a clerk on the Constitutional Court of South Africa; and at the International Labour Organization in Geneva in a unit that focuses on forced labor.
Each summer, the Schell Center provides students with travel grants for international human rights work. In 2011, Kirby Simon Summer Human Rights Fellowships, supported by the Robina Foundation, allowed forty-one students to spend all or part of the summer engaged in human rights internships or research in eighteen countries throughout the world.
The center invites scholars and advocates to visit the Law School as fellows to conduct research, teach seminars, and meet with students. The Tom and Andi Bernstein Fellows in 2011–2012 were John Prendergast, cofounder of the Enough Project, and Octovianus Mote, an indigenous leader from West Papua, Indonesia. Robina Visiting Fellows were Or Bassok, Eugene Garver, and Luke Norris. Schell Fellows were Daniel Bonilla, Hugo Cyr, and Mateo Taussig-Rubbo. The Robert M. Cover–Allard K. Lowenstein Fellow in International Human Rights Law spends two years at the Law School, working on all aspects of the center’s work, including supervision of the Lowenstein Clinic. The Cover-Lowenstein Fellow for 2011–2012 was Allyson McKinney.
The director of the Schell Center is Professor Paul W. Kahn. The executive director is Professor James J. Silk. The Schell Center’s e-mail address is schell.law@yale.edu.
Opportunities for Study in Legal History
The study of American, English, and European legal history occupies an important place in the Law School’s curriculum. Recent and current offerings include courses on the history of the common law, the history of criminal procedure, constitutional history, American legal history, and European legal history. Seminars and lectures by outside scholars in legal history supplement the regular curricular offerings. An informal legal history program brings together students and faculty interested in legal history; it includes students and faculty from the Law School and the Yale Department of History as well as from elsewhere within and outside the University. The Law School also encourages advanced study and original research in American, English, and European legal history. A few students pursue the joint J.D.-Ph.D. program in History or in American Studies.
Visiting Researchers
Each year the Law School has in residence a few visiting researchers engaged in nondegree research. Visiting researchers may audit up to two courses per term (with the consent of individual instructors) and make use of library facilities for their work. Each visiting researcher is charged a registration fee. For academic year 2012–2013 the fee is $4,000 per term, or $8,000 per academic year. No financial aid from the Law School is available for participants in this program.
The visiting researcher application is available on the Law School Web site at www.law.yale.edu/admissions/visitingresearcher.htm. Applications must include a résumé or c.v.; a description of the proposed research, including a statement explaining why Yale Law School is a particularly appropriate affiliation for the proposed work; two letters of recommendation; official transcript(s) of the applicant’s academic record; the proposed length and dates of stay; an official TOEFL report, if English is not the applicant’s primary language; and the $75 application fee. Official transcripts must be submitted in a sealed envelope, signed across the seal. All documents must be in English or accompanied by certified English translation.
Application deadlines are April 1 for the fall term and September 1 for the spring term.
Fellowships for Postgraduate Research
Yale Law School offers a number of fellowships for alumni interested in pursuing careers in public interest law or academia. The Yale Law School Public Interest, Bernstein, Liman, Heyman, Gruber, and Robina Fellowships, among others, support work in various types of public interest positions. The Cover Fellowships, as well as fellowships affiliated with a number of centers and programs, are available for alumni interested in careers in law teaching. For a complete list of fellowships, visit www.law.yale.edu/currentfellowships.
