School Notes: Yale Law School
September/October 2013

White House honors YLS professor

The BioBricks Foundation, a Boston-based nonprofit dedicated to advancing biotechnology to benefit all people, was the recipient of the White House’s “Champions of Change” honor in June for its contribution to open science. The honor highlighted the work of associate professor David Grewal ’02JD, a director on the board of the foundation, and Stanford University’s Drew Endy, a bioengineer and president of BioBricks. Together, Grewal, Endy, and Mark Fischer, of Duane Morris LLP, drafted the BioBrick Public Agreement, a legal contract that makes genetic materials free to share and use. They also worked on underwriting an open technical standards–setting process for the new field of synthetic biology. The White House credited these measures with encouraging everyone to work together in creating a public-domain “operating system” for engineering biology.

Fellowships offer public-interest experience

Forty-one YLS students and recent graduates have been named recipients of public interest fellowships for 2013–2014.  These fellowships help Yale Law graduates launch and maintain public-interest careers in a host of settings and in a variety of capacities. Thirty-four of the recipients will receive postgraduate fellowships through such programs as the YLS Public Interest Fellowship, the Arthur Liman Public Interest Fellowship, and the Robert L. Bernstein Fellowships in International Human Rights. Seven will pursue public-interest work through programs funded by outside organizations, including the Skadden Foundation and the Soros Foundation, and they will be working at such agencies as the US Department of the Treasury, International Criminal Tribunals, American Civil Liberties Union, and the Humane Society of the United States.