School Notes: Yale Law School
May/June 2023

Scholarship program to expand

Yale Law School will expand its Hurst Horizon Scholarship Program, ensuring more students with significant financial need will be able to attend the school tuition-free. The need-based program covers the cost of tuition, fees, and health insurance for students who qualify—a scholarship of more than $70,000 per year. Beginning in fall 2023, students from families with incomes up to 200 percent of the federal poverty line will receive the scholarship. With this increase, the program is expected to cover 80–90 JD students in the classes of 2024, 2025, and 2026, up from 51 students during the 2022–2023 academic year. Yale Law School is one of only two law schools in the country to provide exclusively need-based financial aid.

Professor awarded fellowship

Tracey L. Meares, the Walton Hale Hamilton Professor of Law and founding director of the Justice Collaboratory, has been named a 2023–24 Visiting Scholar by the Russell Sage Foundation. The fellowship brings together leading scholars in the social sciences to pursue their writing and research while in residence at the foundation’s headquarters in New York. Meares will coauthor, with Benjamin Justice ’93, a book that examines how experiences in the criminal legal system affect the civic identities of legally innocent people. Their work will assess three phases of American justice: policing, pretrial detention, and adjudication. 

Order of the Coif honors professor

Oona A. Hathaway ’97JD, the Gerard C. and Bernice Latrobe Smith Professor of International Law, has been selected as the Order of the Coif Distinguished Visitor for 2023. The Order of the Coif is an honorary scholastic society comprising 75 chapters at law schools across the country. It is dedicated to promoting excellence in legal education and recognizes legal scholars and jurists who have “attained high distinction” in their careers. The Distinguished Visitor program brings selected judges, academics, or practitioners to several law schools with established Coif chapters. As the 2023 Distinguished Visitor, Hathaway will travel to Northwestern, Case Western Reserve, and Emory University law schools.