School Notes: Yale Law School
May/June 2016

Supreme Court justice addresses Yale symposium

US Supreme Court associate justice Stephen Breyer spoke at the 2016 Brennan Center Jorde Symposium, held at the Law School on February 17. Justice Breyer discussed the many ways in which American judges, when interpreting American law, must take ever greater account of foreign events, law, and practices—the subject of his book The Court and the World: American Law and the New Global Realities (2015). Breyer, a graduate of Stanford, Oxford, and Harvard Law School, was appointed to the Supreme Court in 1994 by President Clinton.

New initiative promotes open access to health data

The Collaboration for Research Integrity and Transparency (CRIT) at Yale University, a new initiative launching in July 2016, received a $3 million grant from the Laura and John Arnold Foundation to promote open access to high-quality data in health. CRIT is jointly led by the Yale Global Health Justice Partnership, the Media Freedom and Information Access Clinic at Yale Law School, and the Yale Open Data Access Project within the Center for Outcomes Research and Evaluation at Yale–New Haven Hospital and the Yale School of Medicine. CRIT aims to ensure that data about medical products are both rigorous and reliable by promoting open access to all clinical trial information and by supporting independent research and analysis of those data. It will also work to achieve a legal and regulatory environment that supports the production and sharing of high-quality data.

Professor honored by Dutch university

Susan Rose-Ackerman ’70PhD, the Henry R. Luce Professor of Law and Political Science, received an honorary doctorate from the University of Maastricht (UM) in the Netherlands on January 11. The next day, the UM law school organized a conference on themes prominent in her work. Rose-Ackerman received her honorary degree for contributions to research on “the smart mix of instruments that can be employed to fight environmental pollution” and for “her research on regulation, federalism, and corruption, thus showing how the quality of government can be improved.”