School Notes: Yale Law School
September/October 2010

Law students win religious freedom case

Students in the Complex Federal Litigation Clinic at Yale Law School successfully represented a Sunni Muslim woman who filed a lawsuit in federal district court challenging routine pat searches by male corrections officers at the Federal Correctional Institution in Danbury, where she is incarcerated. Beverly Forde said the pat search policy violated her rights under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act and the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. The case, originally filed in 2004, went to trial last December, and in June, senior U.S. district judge Ellen Bree Burns ruled in favor of Forde, ordering the prison to exempt her from non-emergency pat searches by male officers. On the trial team were Megan Quattlebaum ’10JD, Robbie Silverman ’10JD, Avi Springer ’10JD, and Adrienna Wong ’10JD. They were supervised at trial by clinical professor and supervising attorney Brett Dignam, who directed the clinic, as well as clinical lecturers Sarah Russell ’02JD and Scott Shuchart ’03JD.

Center director named White House Fellow

Jeffrey Prescott ’97JD, deputy director of the China Law Center and senior research scholar and lecturer in law at Yale Law School, has been named a White House Fellow, one of the country’s most prestigious programs for leadership and public service. Jeff is one of 13 individuals named to the 2010–2011 class. He will spend a year working as a full-time, paid fellow to a senior White House staff member or other top-ranking government official. Prescott earned his BA, magna cum laude, from Boston University and his JD from Yale Law School, where he was a senior editor of the Yale Law Journal and served in the Lowenstein International Human Rights Clinic, for which he was awarded the C. LaRue Munson Prize. He will be on leave from Yale Law School during his fellowship year, which began at the end of August.

Expert in regulatory law appointed to named position

George L. Priest ’69 has been named the Edward J. Phelps Professor of Law and Economics at Yale Law School. Professor Priest is an internationally recognized expert in the fields of antitrust and regulation whose research over the past two decades has focused on the determinants of economic growth. He joined Yale Law School in 1981 and is codirector of the John M. Olin Center for Law, Economics, and Public Policy, which facilitates the scholarly work of the Yale law and economics faculty and supports student interest and research in the field. In March, Priest was named the Kauffman Distinguished Research Scholar in Law, Economics, and Entrepreneurship, as part of a grant from the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation. The Kauffman grant will support Professor Priest’s work reenergizing the field of law and economics by focusing on how legal institutions can promote entrepreneurship and economic growth. Priest earned a BA from Yale and a JD from the University of Chicago.