School Notes: Yale Law School
July/August 2019

Yale Law Women honor lawmaker

On April 17, Yale Law Women presented its Alumni Achievement Award to Stacey Abrams ’99JD. Abrams is the first woman to lead either party in the Georgia General Assembly and the first African American to lead the Georgia House of Representatives. She is also the first Black woman in the United States to be a major party nominee for governor and the first to give the response to the State of the Union address.

Two elected to the American Academy

Included among more than 200 individuals newly elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences are Tracey L. Meares and Emily Bazelon ’93, ’00JD. Professor Meares, the Walton Hale Hamilton Professor and a founding director of the Justice Collaboratory at Yale Law School, is a nationally recognized expert on policing in urban communities. In December 2014, President Obama named her to his Task Force on 21st Century Policing. Emily Bazelon is senior research scholar in law and Truman Capote Fellow at Yale Law School. She is also a staff writer at the New York Times Magazine and author of Charged: The New Movement to Transform American Prosecution and End Mass Incarceration and the national bestseller Sticks and Stones: Defeating the Culture of Bullying and Rediscovering the Power of Character and Empathy.

Constitutional law expert joins faculty

Dean Heather K. Gerken has announced the appointment of Justin Driver as professor of law, effective July 1. Driver was previously the Harry N. Wyatt Professor of Law at the University of Chicago Law School. A graduate of Brown, Oxford, and Harvard Law School, Driver clerked for Judge Merrick B. Garland, Justice Stephen Breyer, and Justice Sandra Day O’Connor.  A member of the American Law Institute and of the American Constitution Society’s Academic Advisory Board, Driver has a distinguished publication record in the nation’s leading law reviews, and is an editor of the Supreme Court Review.