School Notes: Yale Law School
March/April 2017

Fund will support human rights work at YLS

Yale Law School has received two gifts from the Robina Foundation, totaling $13 million, to create a Robina Human Rights Initiative Endowment Fund and to establish a Binger Clinical Professorship in Human Rights. The fund will support fellowships and financial assistance to Yale Law School students and graduates pursuing careers in human rights; fund visiting human rights faculty, scholars, and practitioners; and underwrite human rights–related research, clinical education, advocacy, teaching, and programming. Professor James Silk ’89JD is the inaugural Binger Clinical Professor of Human Rights. Professor Silk teaches the Allard K. Lowenstein International Human Rights Clinic and is the codirector of the Orville H. Schell Jr. Center for International Human Rights. Professor Silk has also been the chief administrator of the Robina Foundation’s support since it began in 2008.

Clinical professor focuses on incarceration issues

Miriam Gohara joined the Law School faculty January 1 as a clinical associate professor of law. Gohara, a graduate of Harvard Law School and Columbia University, came to Yale as a visiting clinical lecturer in law in 2014 and served in that capacity until being appointed as a visiting clinical associate professor of law and presidential visiting professor in 2016. She leads the Challenging Mass Incarceration Clinic, which represents clients in two types of cases—federal sentencing proceedings and Connecticut state parole hearings. Gohara coteaches the Educational Opportunity and Juvenile Justice Clinic with Professor James Forman Jr. ’92JD, and coteaches the Sol and Lillian Goldman Family Advocacy for Children and Youth Clinic with Professor Jean Koh Peters. Gohara is a member of the board of trustees of the Neighborhood Defender Service of Harlem and is resource counsel with the Federal Capital Habeas Project, where she recruits and provides support to lawyers representing federally death-sentenced prisoners in post-conviction proceedings.