School Notes: Yale Law School
January/February 2010

Yale Law Journal Online launches in DC

Yale Law School’s Supreme Court Advocacy Clinic and the board of the Yale Law Journal Online co-hosted a conference in Washington, DC, in the fall on the Supreme Court’s case selection process. The event also marked the launch of the Yale Law Journal Online, the new online companion to the print Yale Law Journal. It integrates what were previously two websites, the Yale Law Journal and The Pocket Part, the latter being the first-ever online companion published by a leading law review when it debuted in 2005. YLJ Online provides original essays, legal commentaries, responses to articles in the print journal, podcast and iTunes University recordings of featured pieces, and other works by both established and emerging academics and practitioners. “The Yale Law Journal Online provides a markedly improved forum for serious, timely, and accessible scholarship, and represents a great step forward for legal scholarship in general and the Yale Law Journalin particular,” said Yale Law Journal editor-in-chief Benjamin Taibleson ’10JD. YLJ Online will periodically reissue significant past pieces. Additional archived material will be available on the website and will span the journal’s nearly 120-year history. Visit the website at yalelawjournal.org.

Professor honored for achievements in comparative law

Mirjan Damaška, Sterling Professor Emeritus of Law and professorial lecturer in law at Yale Law School, received the American Society of Comparative Law’s Lifetime Achievement Award. Comparative law is the study of differences and similarities in the legal systems of different countries. The award honors “living senior comparatists whose writings have changed the shape or direction of American comparative or private international law.” Professor Damaška said recognition of the comparative law genre was “a source of joy” to him, adding, “In this increasingly interconnected world, comparative law can serve as an instrument to identify deeper similarities behind superficial differences of legal cultures, and concealed differences behind their ostensible similarities.” In announcing the award, Symeon C. Symeonides, president of the American Society of Comparative Law, said Professor Damaška not only met but exceeded the criteria for the award because his contributions “are not only to comparative law but to law in general, and not just in the United States but around the world.”

Justices gather for 13th Global Constitutionalism Seminar

Yale Law School hosted its 13th Global Constitutionalism Seminar in September, bringing together leading Supreme Court and Constitutional Court justices from around the world to discuss in strict confidentiality important legal issues of the day. The theme of the three-day seminar was “Constitutional Administration.” Sixteen justices attended, including Stephen Breyer of the U.S. Supreme Court, as well as justices from Italy, Argentina, England, Germany, Australia, New Zealand, and other countries. Topics discussed this year included the Law of Detention, Constitutional Dimensions of Administrative Law, Constitutional Dimensions of Environmental Law, Dignity, and Precedent. Justice Miguel Poiares Maduro of the European Court of Justice spoke on “Passion and Reason in European Law and Integration,” and Yale Law School’s Judith Resnik, Arthur Liman Professor of Law, discussed “Courts: In and Out of Sight, Site, and Cite.” The Global Constitutionalism Seminar was founded in 1996 to promote international understanding of common issues of constitutional law.