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Welcome to Yale Law Report [online], the blog site for the Yale Law Report.

Click on “Recent Posts” in the left hand column to read a sampling of stories from the latest issue of the YLR including an article about students working in the Law School's Worker and Immigration Rights Advocacy Clinic; an article about “Quotable Yale Law School” by Librarian Fred Shapiro; and profiles of Yale Law School students who have served as Kirby Simon Summer Fellows.

Check out the blog’s photo galleries to see a slideshow of images from Alumni Weekend 2007 and supplementary photo galleries for previous Law Report articles.

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News in Brief, Alumni News, and other sections of the printed version of the Law Report are available via PDF at www.law.yale.edu/ylr.

One Law Clinic, Two Cities

YLS Students Tackle Immigrant Rights Cases in Danbury and New Haven

 
Juan Barrera stands in front of a cluster of microphones, his eyes downcast. He sways from side to side just slightly as he speaks in Spanish. With television cameras rolling and the flash and click of cameras around him, Barrera tells of the day in September 2006 when he was arrested in Danbury, Connecticut, after being offered work as a day laborer.

Beside him stands Justin Cox ’08, a student in the Law School’s Worker and Immigration Rights Advocacy Clinic (WIRAC). When Barrera finishes speaking, Cox begins translating.

“We didn’t know why, but they immediately arrested us and put us in handcuffs. We didn’t know what was going on,” he says.

Barrera begins speaking again, and the cameras continue to roll.

This day marks a milestone not only for Barrera, but also for WIRAC. Cox and other students in the clinic have called this press conference—a year after the arrests of Barrera and ten other Danbury day laborers—to announce that the men popularly known as the “Danbury 11” have filed a federal civil rights lawsuit. With the help of the clinic, nine of the eleven men arrested in September 2006 are suing the City of Danbury, its mayor, several of its police officers, and a number of federal agents for violating the First, Fourth, and Fourteenth Amendments. It has taken thousands of hours of research, writing, and phone calls on the part of the students and their supervising professors to get to this day.

Meanwhile, forty miles away, New Haven is embroiled in its own immigration battle. Again at the center of all of the controversy, a group of Yale Law School students and their teachers have spent countless hours meeting with clients, researching legal standing, and drafting requests and memos.

In June 2007, the New Haven Board of Aldermen overwhelmingly endorsed a municipal ID card program that would allow all residents of New Haven—regardless of citizenship—to obtain “Elm City Resident Cards.” Just two days later, in a move Clinical Professor of Law Michael Wishnie ’93 characterizes as retaliatory, federal immigration officers conducted raids, arresting thirty-two people suspected of being illegal immigrants.

Representing nearly thirty of those arrested, WIRAC is alleging that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents used racial profiling to target those arrested and entered homes without warrants or consent. In August 2007, the clinic filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security aimed at discovering how ICE agents coordinated the June raids and the extent of the New Haven Police Department’s involvement in the raids. The clinic has also filed FOIA suits against the Connecticut State Police, U.S. Marshals Service, and U.S. Department of State, all of whose agents, according to ICE, also participated in the New Haven raids.

“Family members, clergy, community leaders, and city officials asked Yale’s clinic to join them in assisting the men and women arrested in the New Haven raids—the federal government, after all, is represented before the Immigration Court by experienced prosecutors,” Wishnie says about the clinic’s decision to become involved in the case. “The government alleges that each of our clients is an unauthorized immigrant, but those allegations are neither conceded nor proven. Rather, on behalf of our clients we have challenged gross abuses by immigration agents who entered homes without warrants or consent, made arrests without probable cause, engaged in racial profiling, and impermissibly retaliated against the city’s residents for adopting the municipal ID program.”

The Danbury 11
According to the lawsuit brought by the YLS faculty members and students, Juan Barrera and his co-plaintiffs were victims of illegal immigration enforcement by local police and of racial profiling. The “Danbury 11” arrests, the lawsuit alleges, are part of a pattern of unlawful and discriminatory law enforcement by the Danbury Police Department and ICE.

Ten students have worked on the Danbury 11 case, with several faculty members providing oversight. Simon Moshenberg ’08, Elizabeth Simpson ’09, Shayna Strom ’09, and Margot Mendelson ’09 have represented the day laborers in their removal cases, which are pending before an immigration judge in Hartford, and also handled a state FOIA proceeding against Danbury. The civil case filed in September 2007, as well as a pending federal FOIA suit against ICE, is the work of Justin Cox ’08, Rebecca Engel ’09, Geri Greenspan ’08, Thom Ringer ’08, and Michael Tan ’08 (with First Amendment research by Kate Desormeau ’08). Robert M. Cover Clinical Teaching Fellow and Clinical Lecturer in Law Chris Lasch ’96 and Robert M. Cover Clinical Teaching Fellow Ramzi Kassem join Wishnie in supervising the students.

As a second-year law student, Cox heard about the case shortly after the men were arrested on September 19, 2006. “I knew that a couple of my friends (Moshenberg and Greenspan) were working on getting the men out on bond, and I heard how they were driving all over the place to find the guys, scrambling to raise money and conduct legal research,” he remembers. “My initial reaction was that this is why I went to law school—to help people when they need it most-—and that I wanted in.”

Cox’s interest in immigrant rights began in college when he was working at a restaurant waiting tables. The product of a conservative, rural, homogeneously white town in Missouri, he began an unlikely friendship with several of his co-workers who were undocumented workers.

“I eventually learned all about the struggles my co-workers went through to make ends meet,” Cox recalls. “Their stories echoed that of my own mother, working two or three jobs at a time, and I continued learning Spanish to keep exploring this new world.”

A year spent in Latin America furthered his sympathy for undocumented workers in the U.S. “I realized that I was, plain and simple, lucky to have been born into this country, where hard work can pay off meaningfully, and I resolved to help those who weren’t born so lucky,” he explains. “[Barrera et al. v Boughton et al.] encapsulates all of those motivations, I think: these guys were just out looking for honest work so that they could put food on the table, and they got arrested for it because the government thinks they weren’t lucky enough to be born in this country. I can’t imagine anything more unjust.”

On the morning of his arrest in September 2006, Juan Barrera says he was waiting in Danbury’s Kennedy Park—a well-known area for day laborers to wait for work—when a man in a van approached him and offered work demolishing a fence. Barrera accepted the offer and got in the van. A few blocks later, the van pulled into a parking lot, where it was surrounded by law enforcement officials, and Barrera was arrested without explanation. Denied access, he says, to a telephone or an attorney, he was held in solitary confinement for four days, then transferred to a Massachusetts prison.

As it turns out, the men arrested that day were transported to different detention centers around the country, some as far away as Texas. After the initial work of getting the men out on bond, Cox joined the case. Though the immediate concern was building a defense in immigration proceedings, there was also work to be done researching the possibility of an affirmative civil rights suit against the City of Danbury and ICE, sending off various FOIA requests under state and federal law, and filing FOIA actions if the agencies did not respond (the first of which was filed in federal court in December 2006).

The language and geographic barriers made fact development a challenge. “Our clients…spent between ten and thirty-five days in detention,” Cox says. “Throughout the bond process, the team had little contact with them--which, we think, was the point of shipping them all over the place.” But with the help of Danbury and New Haven community members, clinic students were able to talk to the men over several weeks, clarifying what happened. They also researched the context of the arrests and established what Cox calls Danbury’s “recent anti-immigrant policies” which involved, according to the civil suit, unequal enforcement of housing rules, traffic stops motivated by racial profiling, and a crackdown on volleyball games, a sport favored by the Ecuadorean community.

“What became clear through our fact development was that whoever carried out the arrests trampled on our clients’ constitutional rights,” Cox says. “In particular, the fact that they were arrested without a single question being asked of them is indicative of Fourth Amendment and Equal Protection violations (the latter because the officers were apparently just assuming that since they were Latino, they were undocumented). The background information about the attempts of Mayor Boughton and the Danbury police to drive the day laborers away from Kennedy Park suggested they were being retaliated against for their First Amendment rights to congregate and solicit work.” One of the suit’s common threads is that the Danbury Police routinely make civil immigration arrests without having followed the statutory procedures set out by Congress for the local enforcement of immigration laws.

After brainstorming possible constitutional violations and theories, the team divided the work into substantive areas of law. Tan took on Equal Protection; Desormeau and Engel worked on the First Amendment; Ringer tackled preemption; Cox took the Fourth Amendment and Federal Tort Claims Act; Moshenberg, Simpson, and Strom became the experts on state FOIA and the immigration proceedings; Greenspan researched issues of standing, federal FOIA, and municipal liability.

As they each produced memos on their area of law, the students reached out to YLS faculty (including David Boies Professor of Law Robert Post ’77 and then Sidley Austin - Robert D. McLean ’70 Visiting Professor of Law Pam Karlan ’84) for their expertise. In between weekly strategy meetings with Wishnie and Lasch, the students sent flurries of emails, sharing drafts of memos and complaints. “The more we researched and wrote,” Cox says, “the more inspired we became, for what we were learning was only confirming our own gut instincts about the case: our clients had been grievously wronged.”

Besides learning firsthand about the Fourth Amendment, FOIA litigation, the nuts and bolts of immigration law and proceedings and filing a lawsuit, Cox has improved his Spanish, particularly his legal vocabulary.

“I’ve also learned a great deal about how local municipalities, frustrated at the lack of federal action in immigration law and enforcement, are attempting to fill the vacuum with their own regulation and enforcement activities,” Cox says.

The clinic students and faculty meet with their Danbury clients about once a month, though Moshenberg and Cox (both of whom speak Spanish) keep in touch with the men more regularly to ask follow-up questions and remind them of court appearances. Other members of the team are in charge of cooperating with Danbury community supporters, who include clergy, private citizens, and town council members.

“Our clients have been very appreciative of our work, and conscientiously do everything we ask of them,” Cox says. “They know that they represent a larger struggle for Latino and immigrants’ rights in Danbury and beyond.”

The New Haven Raids
While Cox and others have been working on the Danbury 11 case, Stella Burch ’09 has been focusing her efforts on a separate immigration case in New Haven. On the morning of her third day working with the clinic this past summer, Burch heard whispers in the hallways that something “big” had happened. Over the course of the day, details emerged and clinic students learned that a number of Fair Haven residents had been arrested in raids conducted by ICE agents.

The raids came just two days after New Haven’s Board of Aldermen approved a proposal to create a municipal ID program, effectively granting all New Haven residents—regardless of immigration status—a form of valid identification entitling them to certain municipal services.

That evening, Burch and a number of her peers went to a local church where they worked with the families and friends of those who had been arrested. “It was a very moving experience,” Burch remembers. “People were distraught—especially the children who had seen their parents arrested. People were afraid to come forward and speak to us, afraid to be out on the streets, and even afraid to return to their own homes.” After several hours, the volunteers had compiled a preliminary list of people who had gone missing during the raids.

“As soon as we had names we started calling prisons—trying to find out where our clients were,” Burch remembers. “This was not an easy task. In order to locate anyone detained within the immigration system, you need an Alien Identification Number, known as an ‘A number,’ issued to an alleged alien when he or she is processed by the authorities. But nobody knew the A-numbers, apart from the detainees themselves, who had not been able to make phone calls. We eventually located our clients by making cold calls to prisons—we called just about all of the county jails and private prisons in New England to track down all of our clients.” Similar to the Danbury case, those arrested in the New Haven raids were moved out of state—to Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Maine. Concerned that their clients would be moved even farther away, clinic attorneys two days after the raids tried to file emergency bond motions in their clients’ names. Those motions were initially rejected because the attorneys didn’t yet have the clients’ A numbers.

Visiting her clients in a Rhode Island jail the weekend after the arrests was an experience that Burch (who is British and had never before been to an American prison) describes as “sobering.”

The visit, though, strengthened her resolve for the upcoming days of exhaustion. “I don’t think anyone can really be prepared for the whirlwind experience of that first week—I certainly wasn’t,” she says. “We didn’t sleep much, and we had to fight hard for every scrap of information we could lay our hands on. It was also emotionally draining, hearing the stories of how people had been taken away from their families—especially the stories told by the children. But the guidance from [supervising attorneys] Mike Wishnie, Hope Metcalf, and Chris Lasch was amazing—I think all of the students felt overwhelmed by the experience, but incredibly supported in our work.”

Burch and fellow clinic students Tan, Bram Elias ’09, Deborah Marcuse ’08, Anand Balakrishnan ’09, Sarahi Uribe (a recent Yale College graduate who had taken an immigration clinic while an undergrad and speaks Spanish fluently), and two law school students from the University of Connecticut and the University of Pennsylvania often worked late into the night, sustained by large quantities of local pizza.

The students met with their clients several times while they were in prison and interacted frequently with the clients’ families. “It was very humbling,” Burch says, “to hear them say ‘we believe in you, we know you will get us out of jail.’ We were first-year law students, we knew nothing—or at best next-to-nothing—and we were still the best ‘lawyers’ to whom our clients had access.”

Community support for those arrested was high. A few days after the raids, St. Rose of Lima church organized a special Mass and candlelight vigil in support of the detainees. “The church was packed: looking out across the congregation I saw not just Catholics, but also Protestant clergy and Jewish men in yarmulkes,” Burch remembers. “Outside the church people of all races, ages, faiths, and denominations mingled on the steps wearing signs saying ‘no human is illegal.’ The son of one of our clients wore a huge board around his neck with the names of everyone who we knew had been taken, including his mother.”

Burch describes the clinic’s clients as hardworking, decent, and family-oriented. And she questions the methods used by ICE agents and the detainees’ lack of access to attorneys. “Immigration raids like this happen every day, in cities across the U.S., in places where there is no Yale Law School, and no widespread city and community support for the detainees,” she says. “We have a real opportunity here in New Haven to litigate this case on behalf of our clients and other people like them, in the hope that by doing so we can bring about real change.”

In addition to being emotionally rewarding, working with the clinic has provided Burch practical experience. “It’s one thing to learn the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure and quite another to have to file an emergency bond motion in immigration court!” she says.

As a British citizen accustomed to a centralized government, she feels the experience has given her a new appreciation for the ways in which a federal system can propel progressive policy making and the power of local government.

“The City of New Haven’s support for its immigrant community, and the progressive policies it has introduced—for example the Elm City Resident’s Card Municipal ID or the NHPD General Order prohibiting police officers from inquiring into immigration status—have really changed my perception of what local government can achieve,” she says.

That type of hands-on learning is at the heart of the clinic’s benefit to students. “In a clinical program, students must learn to apply abstract legal rules to the reality of human behavior,” says Wishnie. “And in exercising judgment on behalf of a real client, in a teaching environment that encourages planning, reflection, and self-evaluation, the students learn the craft of lawyering.”

In the past few months, additional students have joined the work on the New Haven Raids case and associated FOIA cases. They are: Nicole Hallett ’08, Stephanie Akpa ’09, Anant Saraswat ’09, Prithika Balakrishnan ’09, Amanda Aikman ’08, Simon Moshenberg ’08, Justin Cox ’08, Rebecca Engel ’09, and Shayna Strom ’09.

The Jerome N. Frank Legal Services Organization’s Worker and Immigrant Rights Clinic represents immigrants and low-wage workers in Connecticut in labor, immigration, trafficking, and other civil rights areas, through litigation for individuals and non-litigation advocacy for community-based organizations.
Students handle cases at all stages of legal proceedings in Immigration Court, U.S. District Court, and other forums. The clinic’s non-litigation work includes representation of grassroots organizations in regulatory and legislative reform efforts, media advocacy, strategic planning, and other matters.
For more information, visit www.law.yale.edu/wirc.

Text by Kaitlin Thomas 

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Kirby Simon Summer Fellows Tell Their Stories

Each summer, Yale Law School students—most of whom have just finished their first year of classes—travel around the world to spend three months merging their new academic interests and legal theory with hands-on practice.

Although many YLS students have had opportunities to study and live abroad, the Kirby Simon Summer Fellowships allow a significant number of students to be deeply engaged with some of the most pressing global issues of our time and to grapple in challenging circumstances with what they have been learning about law and the role of law in protecting people’s fundamental rights.

For each of the past few years, approximately forty students have gone to work in every continent on the widest spectrum of human rights issues imaginable. “When we gather in the fall to share experiences, students—even those who had difficult times—tell their stories in the language of life-transforming insights,” says Clinical Professor of Law James Silk ’89, who directs the Allard K. Lowenstein International Human Rights Clinic and is executive director of the Law School’s Orville H. Schell, Jr. Center for International Human Rights.

“For those who want to pursue careers in human rights, the summer fellowships often give them their first opportunity to work in the field, particularly in challenging situations where serious human rights abuses are being perpetrated. This sort of experience is a critically important credential for human rights work, but one of the most difficult to obtain. And I’m confident,” Silk adds, “that these experiences have a profound and lifelong effect on how all of the summer fellows will practice law, whether in nonprofit organizations, firms, corporations, or government.”

Three students who served as Kirby Simon Fellows during the summer of 2007 agreed to share the highlights of their experiences with the Yale Law Report. Their reflections follow.

Laurie Ball, dual degree student
State Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina

The Project  I worked for the Office of the Prosecutor for War Crimes at the State Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH). Both foreign nationals and Bosnian and Herzegovinian (BH) nationals work in the War Crimes Prosecutor’s Office. I worked with the team that handles prosecutions arising out of the July 1995 Srebrenica massacres. I was working on three different trials, all of which were in different stages of development. The largest trial had eleven defendants, and the defendants had already begun presenting their case when I arrived. I compiled witness narratives in preparation for cross-examination and responded to motions related to custody and other procedural matters for this case. The second case had four defendants and the prosecution was still presenting the case-in-chief. For this case, I also assisted with witness proofing prior to testimony. The third case was a transfer case from the International Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), and the defendant arrived from The Hague soon after I began work. For that case, I helped to prepare the modified BH indictment. I also helped to process new information from the BH Office of the Prosecutor’s ongoing Srebrenica investigation.

Life in BiH  I had lived in BiH for two years before coming to law school. I originally went to the country on a fellowship from Duke University during 2004–05 working for Foundation Mozaik, a local BH organization focused on community development in rural areas. I continued working for the Foundation in 2005-06. I lived with a family that survived the genocide at Srebrenica in 2004 and spent a great deal of time in Eastern BiH before law school. My work as a Kirby Simon Fellow was especially rewarding given my ties to the area around Srebrenica and my relationships with many people who survived the genocide there.

Challenges  When I lived in BiH previously, I was constantly hearing stories of survival. While I am certain that I spoke with more than a few perpetrators during [that] time, those individuals were never speaking about their roles perpetrating war crimes. One especially challenging aspect of working on the Srebrenica trials this past summer was that we were dependent on insider witnesses —many of whom may have taken part in the massacres or their cover-up in some way.

The Future  Through my earlier work with survivors of torture in Latin America and BiH, as well as survivors from other countries across the globe, I’ve learned a great deal about the challenges of community recovery from such trauma. I’m committed to continuing to work toward such recovery, especially through war crimes prosecutions and rule of law initiatives.

Laurie Ball is a dual degree student; while in the Law School’s J.D. program, she is also pursuing an MPA with the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton. She will complete both programs in 2010.


Andrew Verstein ’09
Beijing Rural Migrant’s Legal Aid and Research Center, China

The Project   I worked primarily for the Beijing Rural Migrant’s Legal Aid and Research Center. It is a young NGO. All of the attorneys are Chinese. The primary work of the office is providing direct legal services to Beijing’s 4,000,000 temporary workers. Arriving from poorer provinces to fuel the capital city’s construction boom, these men and women work under dangerous conditions with uncertain protections. Construction-related injuries are common, and employers frequently ignore their contractual or legal obligations to provide support for disabled employees. Even for workers lucky enough to avoid serious injury, payment of a regular wage is a hope rather than an expectation. Complex systems of formal and informal subcontracting make it easy for employers to shirk their responsibilities.
The Center provides free legal consultations to tens of thousands of workers every year…After only a few years, the Center has recovered tens of millions of RMB [Chinese currency] for workers and persuaded many businesses…to change their labor practices. The Center also conducts research in order to inform policy makers, academics, and professionals. I assisted with this research. My role was comparative—I would research what American laws and policies are for X, the history and development of the European treatment of Y. My research would help the attorneys to decide what they would like to see change in China—and provide evidentiary support for papers and speeches advocating those changes.

The Inspiration   I came to Yale interested in international law—I spent a year between college and law school working as a paralegal in Milan, Mexico City, and Paris—but I had not decided to focus on China. It is fortuitous that Paul Gewirtz ’70 was my small group professor. As the Director of The China Law Center, he was able to give me some great research projects relating to Chinese legal reform, and introduce me to some of China’s most brilliant jurists, reformers, and academics. I’m grateful for that window into a wide universe of legal, social, and political issues.

Life in China   Although my work was primarily with the Rural Migrants office, I spent a substantial portion of my summer assisting the related Beijing Children’s Legal Aid and Research Center. The Rural Migrants office is an offshoot of that organization and the lawyers are acquainted. I was also able to visit network offices in Chengdu, Sichuan, and Lhasa, Tibet.
On a typical day, I would meet with my Mandarin Chinese language tutor for a lesson over breakfast. I’d spend the morning on the Internet researching something for one of the attorneys. I’d go to a local restaurant with my colleagues for lunch. We worked near where the migrants lived, so the restaurants were as authentic as you could find. I may have learned more at lunch than in my morning research session. The afternoon would often be a wild card. Sometimes we’d host visitors—academics conducting research, or an NGO asking if they could help us, or if we could help them. Or sometimes the staff would gather to discuss cases. And sometimes we’d host the media —I was interviewed on CCTV about U.S. tobacco law.

Olivia Salisbury Sinaiko ’09
South Asia Human Rights Documentation Centre, India

The Project   As a very small NGO with only a handful of people on permanent staff, SAHRDC plays a very different role than some of the more traditional human rights organizations that I had been familiar with before coming to India. Unlike those more traditional organizations, it doesn’t do a lot of primary research and field reporting. Rather, I think it’s fair to say that it sees itself more as a watchdog over those larger institutions that have taken on the responsibility of watching over human rights—governments, UN bodies, and even some well-established NGOs. SAHRDC oversees the overseers, so to speak. It narrowly targets its resources, publishing frequent critiques of these larger institutions’ work and attempting to fill what gaps they may have left, all with the aim of aiding the broader South Asian human rights community in more effectively achieving its goals. I need to clarify that this was my impression of SAHRDC’s work after the short time I spent there, and not necessarily the way the organization would characterize itself. But with that said, I did come away from the summer thinking that this approach—essentially, playing the role of outside monitor to a number of institutions that presumably want to do as good a job as possible at promoting human rights—has great potential as a way for small organizations with very limited resources to be incredibly effective. The focus of my work while at the Centre was to write a report for an International Committee of the Red Cross publication on torture. My piece analyzed the way that U.S. human rights policy and legal strategy in the War on Terror have affected the law and practice of torture in South Asia. I looked at a wide variety of sources to try to get a sense of both the direct and indirect ways that U.S. policy has impacted human rights in the region.

Life in Delhi   I lived about a five-minute walk from the office, which was in a very residential neighborhood in the south of Delhi called Safdarjung Enclave. I had an apartment by myself, but I lived just a few doors down from a number of other interns from the office. The community we lived in was very family-oriented, with many generations often living under one roof. And as a result of the summer heat, the neighborhood had this amazing evening and nighttime culture—kids playing badminton and soccer in the street, grandmothers sitting and talking on cots in the late afternoon shade. The alley was lined with food stalls and fabric stores that would open their doors when the sun went down, selling freshly fried deliciousness right out of these massive bubbling pots of oil. It was a really special place to live, and I found the community incredibly welcoming.

Challenges   My first day in the office, I was given a research assignment on the National Women’s Commission of India. At first I was pretty excited about it—the issue was interesting, and I was eager to start my work for the Centre. But when I found out that the male interns on my floor were working on issues of torture, caste-discrimination, and terrorism, respectively, my attitude toward my assignment changed. Looking into it a little further, I realized that as far as I could tell, in the recent history of the organization, all assignments relating to women’s rights had been assigned exclusively to women.
In Dean Koh’s International Human Rights class, we learned a lot about the marginalization of women’s rights in the human rights community—they are seen as women’s issues, rather than authentic human rights issues. Experiencing this marginalization firsthand was deeply affecting. It is by no means a problem particular to SAHRDC, but one that plagues the entire international human rights community. It’s a situation that I feel must change in order for real progress on these issues to be made.

The Future   My experience in India was incredibly affirming. I feel very deeply after my time there that law school was the right choice for me. There is such a variety of ways to use a law degree to effect change, and I think that the people at SAHRDC and the work they do really embody that. I came away from my summer invigorated, and tremendously excited about going forward in my legal career.

In recent years, more than twenty percent of all first-year students have received summer funding from the school’s Orville H. Schell, Jr. Center for International Human Rights. Much of this funding is provided by the Center’s Kirby Simon Summer Fellowship program, supported by a grant from the Diamondston Foundation to honor J. Kirby Simon, the son of Professor John Simon ’53, who died in 1995 while serving as a foreign service officer in Taiwan.

To learn more about the Schell Center and the summer fellowship program, visit www.law.yale.edu/schell. YLS also offers international fellowships for graduates of the Law School. To learn more about those opportunities, visit www.law.yale.edu/academics/internationalfellowships.asp.


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Quotable Yale Law School

By Fred R. Shapiro
Associate Librarian for Collections and Access and Lecturer in Legal Research, Yale Law School
Editor, The Yale Book of Quotations

The history of Yale Law School is contained not just in the bricks and mortar of its building, but in the legacy of its students, graduates, and professors. To unearth the more quotable instances of YLS history, the Law Report enlisted the help of Fred R. Shapiro, the Law School’s Associate Librarian for Collection and Access Services and Lecturer in Legal Research. A world-recognized authority on quotations, Shapiro edited The Yale Book of Quotations and the award-winning Oxford Dictionary of American Legal Quotations. His research on quotations and
words has been the subject of numerous articles in The New York Times and other media, including a front-page profile in The Wall Street Journal. Shapiro is also a major contributor to the Oxford English Dictionary and has published numerous articles on language, law, and information science.

When I compiled the recently published Yale Book of Quotations, my intention was to create the most accurate, comprehensive, and up-to-date quotation dictionary. I did not specifically seek to collect quotations relating to Yale Law School, but because I have worked at the Law School for twenty years, am familiar with its heritage and personalities, and am generally interested in law and legal history, it was inevitable that a fair number of quotations by YLS graduates and faculty would end up in my compilation. The fact that Yale Law School people have traditionally had wide-ranging interests, embracing the fullest version of legal culture and also extending beyond law to politics, literature, and many other fields, did not hurt in ensuring that my roster of the 13,000 or so most famous quotations would include a good collection of sound bites from those who have studied or taught at the school.

For example, one of the most renowned quotations to emerge from Supreme Court jurisprudence is Potter Stewart’s ’41 characterization of pornography: “I know it when I see it” (Jacobellis v. Ohio [1964]). This one may have had a collaborative YLS-alum genesis, since Ray Lamontagne ’64 has alerted me that the line seems to have originated in a conversation between Stewart and his then-clerk Alan Novak ’63. Other quotations from Supreme Court justices who attended YLS have also entered the language:

The Constitution of the United States is a law for rulers and people, equally in war and in peace, and covers with the shield of its protection all classes of men, at all times, and under all circumstances. No doctrine, involving more pernicious consequences, was ever invented by the wit of man than that any of its provisions can be suspended during any of the great exigencies of government.
David Davis Class of 1835, Ex parte Milligan (1867)

The conception of political equality from the Declaration of Independence, to Lincoln’s Gettysburg address, to the Fifteenth, Seventeenth, and Nineteenth Amendments can mean only one thing—one person, one vote.
William O. Douglas [taught at Yale Law School, 1928–34], Gray v. Sanders (1963)

It can hardly be argued that either students or teachers shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.
Abe Fortas ’33, Tinker v. Des Moines Indep. Community School Dist. (1969)

William Howard Taft was a Supreme Court chief justice (and, incidentally, also a United States president) who taught at Yale Law School from 1913 to 1921. His judicial opinions did not feature deathless pronouncements, but he had a fine sense of humor and his self-deprecating quips about his weight (about 350 pounds) have lived on. For example, when Taft was stuck at a railroad station and was told that the train only stopped there if a number of passengers wished to come aboard, he telegraphed the conductor: “Stop at Hicksville. Large party waiting to catch train.” Anson Phelps Stokes would recall that “when I suggested to him … that he occupy a Chair of Law at the University, he said that he was afraid that a Chair would not be adequate, but that if we would provide a Sofa of Law, it might be all right.”

Of course, the words of Yale Law School affiliates figure prominently among the memorable statements of legal scholarship. The Yale Book of Quotations provides the following illustrations, among others:

Even more than as a producer of judges or academics, Yale Law School has become celebrated as a trainer of political leaders. Among presidents, Gerald R. Ford ’41 left his mark in American quotational history:

One of the greatest legal writers is Charles A. Reich ’52. I consider the following passage by Reich (published in The Yale Law Journal) to be as eloquent as any that has ever appeared in a law review:

Bill Clinton ’73 also has a legacy of famous quotations. Among his entries in The Yale Book of Quotations may be found phrases such as “The comeback kid,” “I feel your pain,” “The era of big government is over,” “Let us resolve to build [a] bridge to the 21st century,” “Strength and wisdom are not opposing values,” and “The American people [are] tired of the politics of personal destruction.”

President Clinton’s spouse, Hillary Rodham Clinton ’73, who may well be a future president herself, has contributed her own share of memorable remarks found in the YBQ, such as:

I conclude with a trio of miscellaneous quotations, transcending the realms of law or presidential politics, as YLS alumni reflect on broad topics of human experience:

Alumni Weekend 2007: 21st Century Democracy: Elections, Media, Politics

Read this article via PDF.

View videos of the panel discussions.

View additional photos of Alumni Weekend.

Twenty-first Century Democracy was the topic of discussion at the Law School October 12–14 as hundreds of graduates from across the globe gathered for Alumni Weekend. Panel discussions focused on the role of media and technology in democracy and law, separation of powers, the Voting Rights Act, and money and politics. In addition to lively debates, graduates enjoyed time reconnecting with old friends and making new ones during several receptions, dinners, and the Alumni Luncheon at which New York Times Supreme Court Correspondent Linda Greenhouse ’78 MSL received the Yale Law School Association Award of Merit.

The following excerpted quotes give a flavor of the breadth and depth of the conversation. (To view videos of the panel discussions and photos of the weekend, visit www.law.yale.edu/alumniweekend.)
 

Emily C. Bazelon ’00
Senior Editor, Slate
Steve [Brill ’75] was talking about charging customers on the Internet. I see the economic rationale for that, I just don’t think that it flies culturally. I think we’ve all gotten so used to the Internet being this free place. As someone who only writes online, I love that about it. It has this kind of free-wheeling beauty to me. There’s so much response and so much give and take—I wouldn’t change that. But then if you decide we’re too far along the free Internet highway, then you really do need to come up with some kind of other ownership entity because, you know, right now we are relying on a few families, essentially—the Graham family, the Sulzbergers, we were relying on the Bancrofts, we no longer can—and that is not enough. That doesn’t seem like any long-term prescription for a healthy democracy.
from “The Next Generation of Law and Media” panel

Bruce Ackerman ’67
Sterling Professor of Law, Yale Law School
We should have a new framework statute in which, after one of these events, not before, the President should go to Congress and ask for sixty days of emergency power… and after seven days, he gets it if there is a simple majority in Congress to support it. Then he has to come back after sixty days and ask for an extension for sixty days and he needs sixty percent of the vote, and then seventy percent, and then eighty percent, and then eighty percent for every sixty days after that....What we need… is a structure to prevent the normalization of emergency.
from “The New Separation of Powers: Parties, Politics, and the Presidency” panel

Charlie Savage ’03 MSL
National Legal Affairs Correspondent, The Boston Globe
I’m going to be talking about what has been the single most competently and successfully implemented agenda and policy of the Bush administration. They’re beat up all the time for being incompetent when it comes to things like Katrina or how the Iraq occupation was run. There’s one thing in particular they’ve done magnificently well, ingeniously. And separate from whatever their policy merits, you have to admire just how well they’ve done it. And that is that they’ve set out from the very beginning, from the day after the inauguration, long before 9/11, to use their time in office to expand presidential power...
from “The New Separation of Powers: Parties, Politics, and the Presidency” panel

Jeff Greenfield ’67
Senior Political Correspondent, CBS News
If you are passionate about politics, there is more information, analysis, opinion out there than ever. The question is: ‘What does it mean that we have these tools?’… What does it mean, for instance, that candidates not only can talk about themselves but that, for instance, when Rudy Guiliani went to the NRA and took the cell phone call from his wife the Romney campaign within an hour or so had on YouTube [video of Romney] doing the same thing two months earlier? So clearly there’s stuff out there that’s going to hold candidates’ feet to the fire... What it means, I don’t know. Because I don’t know… how much of this is being consumed by people who will actually vote.
from “The Media Covering Elections: Heroes or Villains?” panel

Myron H. Thompson ’72, Judge
U.S. District Court, Middle District of Alabama
One of my first cases, and I have to admit, my most beloved voting rights cases, was Harris v. Graddick…The case had been brought to get blacks to come to vote and the lawyers had come up with this great idea of having the percentage of polling officials be the same as the percentage of blacks in the area. And that was probably the easiest opinion of all of the voting rights cases I have ever written because I wrote it from the heart. I remember I said that to me the purpose of Section 2 was to make sure that the electoral process was welcoming to all people. And I remember writing those words, and I was writing it because I had never felt welcome there.
from “Race, Politics, and the Voting Rights Act” panel

Beth Simone Noveck ’97
Professor of Law, New York Law School;
Director, Institute for Information Law and Policy; Director, Do Tank
Now is really the time to use the Net not simply to raise money for campaigns, but to raise ideas and awareness. To allow citizens to participate in the making of policy…Our institutions of democracy are fundamentally about power. They’re fundamentally about centralizing power and they have a very hard time adjusting to devolving power and changing the way they work because of a long-standing culture of professionalism... And I think what the new tools do for us is to help us open up our understanding of expertise, to open up our understanding of professionalism in order that we can move beyond representative and electoral conceptions of democracy towards a future of more collaborative, more participatory, and more open governance.
from “The New Tools: The Internet Influencing Democracy” panel

Norman J. Ornstein, Resident Scholar
American Enterprise Institute
I have seen many instances of staffers who are approached by former colleagues saying ‘I’ve got this client I want you or your boss to sit down with.’ The normal reaction would be ‘I wouldn’t go anywhere near [that person]’ but now it’s, ‘you know, a couple of years from now I’m going to want to go out and maybe join your firm so that I can make it in this society,’ and you get those meetings actually taking place. And you get members of Congress who say, ‘I’m making a sacrifice for public service and I’m going to stick around and make that sacrifice even though I could make twenty times what I’m making now. But under those circumstances aren’t I entitled to a little bit? Aren’t I entitled to have one of my friends who may also be getting a great earmark from me do a little work on my house?’... What we’re finding is that money—which is always a problem—is becoming much, much worse in terms of the atmosphere and casual corruption in Washington, and that has nothing to do with the campaigns but everything to do with politics.
from “Money and Politics” panel


Read this article via PDF.
To view videos of the panel discussions and photos of the weekend, visit www.law.yale.edu/alumniweekend.