School Notes: Yale Law School
September/October 2020

Professor awarded prize in jurisprudence

Sterling Professor Emeritus of Law Owen Fiss has been awarded the 2020 Henry M. Phillips Prize in Jurisprudence by the American Philosophical Society. Established in 1888, the prize is awarded in recognition of outstanding lifetime contributions to the field of jurisprudence and important publications which illustrate that accomplishment. At the Law School, Fiss has taught procedure, legal theory, and constitutional law. He has authored numerous articles and books, including his most recent book, Pillars of Justice: Lawyers and the Liberal Tradition. In a 2012 study, four of his articles were named as among the top 100 most-cited law review articles of all time.

Solomon Center launches new elder project

Over the 2019–20 academic year, the Solomon Center for Health Law and Policy at Yale Law School launched the Adrienne C. Drell and Franklin W. Nitikman Elder Law Project to explore aging and the law through multiple prongs—academic, experiential, and theoretical. This project is inspired and supported by Adrienne Drell ’92MSL and Franklin Nitikman ’66LLB. As part of the launch, the center offered a pathbreaking seminar on Aging and the Law, marking the first time in years that such a course has been taught at the Law School. It included an innovative experiential component in which students worked on a variety of real-world projects, including a project for the Center for Medicare Advocacy on home health care. The project also expands the center’s clinical offering—the Medical Legal Partnership (MLP) program—to include a geriatric MLP that will provide legal services in a medical setting to the elderly. The Geriatric MLP will launch through a partnership between the palliative care and geriatric teams at Yale New Haven Hospital designed to coordinate holistic care for COVID-19 patients.