School Notes: Yale Law School
January/February 2024

Professor named to UN working group

The United Nations Human Rights Council has appointed Clinical Professor Claudia Flores to its Working Group on Discrimination Against Women and Girls. Flores, director of the Allard K. Lowenstein International Human Rights Clinic and faculty codirector of the Orville H. Schell Jr. Center for International Human Rights, will assume the membership seat reserved for Western Europe and Other States. The working group seeks to eliminate discrimination against women in law and in practice by reinforcing states’ obligations to respect, protect, and fulfill women’s human rights.

Award honors professor’s work

Sterling Professor of International Law Harold Hongju Koh is the 2023 recipient of the Raphael Lemkin Rule of Law Guardian Medal awarded by Duke University’s Bolch Judicial Institute. Koh is internationally recognized as a leading expert in public and private international law, national security law, and human rights. He is currently among the lawyers representing Ukraine at the International Court of Justice in The Hague, asking the court to declare Russia in violation of three international treaties. He is a prolific writer and scholar whose career has spanned numerous positions in academia and public service. The award honors individuals who seek to advance and protect the rule of law in their everyday work. 

Political scientist to join YLS faculty

Keith Whittington ’95PhD will join the school this year as a chaired professor of law. Whittington is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Politics in the Department of Politics at Princeton University, where his teaching and scholarship focus on American constitutional theory, American political and constitutional history, judicial politics, the presidency, and free speech and the law. At Yale Whittington will launch a center devoted to the study of free speech and academic freedom, with the generous support of the Stanton Foundation. A graduate of Yale and the University of Texas, Austin, Whittington is the founding chair of the academic committee of the Academic Freedom Alliance and a Hoover Institution Visiting Fellow. He is a member of the American Academy of the Arts and Sciences and served on the Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States.