In advance of its launch, The Yale Law Journal Online joined with the Yale Law School Supreme Court Advocacy Clinic to host a conference, "Important Questions of Federal Law": Assessing the Supreme Court's Case Selection Process, on September 18, 2009, at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. The conference considered the nature and causes of changes in the Supreme Court's docket in recent years, as well as suggestions for reform of the certiorari process. The conference was made possible by the generous support of the Oscar M. Ruebhausen Fund. Among the panelists were the Hon. J. Harvie Wilkinson III, Seth Waxman, Sanford Levinson, and Linda Greenhouse. Media coverage of the event included The National Law Journal's piece, "The Supreme Court Cert Pool: Sotomayor Joins It, Lawyers Attack It," available at Law.com.
If you were unable to attend, podcasts of conference sessions and downloadable papers from the panelists will be made available by Yale Law School's main website. Select papers will also be published by The Yale Law Journal Online.
Information on the conference can also be downloaded by clicking here.
On June 22, 2009, Robert C. Post (Note Editor, Vol. 86, 1977) was named Dean and Sol and Lillian Goldman Professor of Law at Yale Law School. Professor Post, who has been the David Boies Professor of Law at Yale since 2003, is the seventh alumnus of The Yale Law Journal to become Dean of the Law School. He becomes the sixteenth Dean of Yale Law School, succeeding Harold Hongju Koh, who now serves as Legal Adviser to the U.S. State Department. Kate Stith, Lafayette S. Foster Professor of Law, served as Acting Dean between March and July.
Alumni of The Yale Law Journal currently serve as deans of nearly twenty of the nation's leading law schools, including Harvard (Martha Minow, '79), New York University (Richard Revesz, '83), Columbia (David Schizer, '93), the University of Pennsylvania (Michael Fitts, '79), the University of Virginia (Paul Mahoney, '84), the University of Michigan (Evan Caminker, '86), and Georgetown (T. Alexander Aleinikoff, '77).
