Yale Law School

Over the years, I've had a lot of trouble keeping off weight. I'd go on a serious diet and lose dozens of pounds fairly quickly, but usually most of it would come back on within a year. But at the beginning of last year, I tried something new. I promised my colleague, Dean Karlan, who teaches economics at Yale University, where I teach law, that I would lose 20 pounds and keep it off.

William L. Taylor didn't necessarily look the part of a leading civil rights advocate, a matter he addressed in his memoir under the heading "A White Guy Like Me," as in: "What leads a white guy like me to spend his life working on behalf of black people?" Growing up Jewish in Brooklyn while the Holocaust raged in Europe helped shape his future, he wrote. Another early lesson in civil rights came from following the "career and courage" of Jackie Robinson as he broke major league baseball's color line in 1947.

She grew up in rural poverty in a home that did not have indoor plumbing. She was serious, hard-working and listened to her elders. And when she graduated from Yale Law School, she began a career that soon flourished. Anita Faye Hill has become Judge Clarence Thomas' bitter antagonist by accusing her former boss of sexual harassment, but in some ways their lives are eerily similar.

"We ate macaroni and cheese five nights a week. . . . I think that's all we had for months," one divorced mother reported to sociologist Lenore J. Weitzman. Said another: "I applied for welfare. . . . I never dreamed that I, a middle-class housewife, would ever be in a position like that." In the first year after divorce, men's standard of living rises 42% while that of women and their children drops 73%.

Guido Calabresi, 52, one of the nation's leading law educators, has been appointed dean of Yale University Law School effective July 1, it was announced Wednesday.

Abraham S. Goldstein, 80, a criminal law scholar who became the dean of Yale University's law school in 1970, died after a heart attack Saturday at his home in Woodbridge, Conn., Yale announced. "He had high standards and steered the school through very troubled times with success," said Bruce Ackerman, a Yale professor of law and political science.

Harold Hongju Koh, an outspoken advocate of human rights and international law, has been chosen to be the top lawyer at the State Department. Koh, dean at the Yale Law School, has been one of the most vocal critics of the Bush administration's approach to the detention and trial of terrorism suspects, calling a 2002 memo justifying harsh interrogation methods a "stain on our national reputation."

For a teenager from a Puerto Rican family struggling upward from the public housing projects of the Bronx, Princeton University in 1972 was a foreign land. "I felt isolated from all I had ever known," she said later, and the low grade she got on one of her first papers drove home the point -- sending her flying to get remedial help. Four years later, Sonia Maria Sotomayor won the Pyne Prize, the highest honor awarded a Princeton undergraduate.

Former San Francisco Board of Supervisors President Angela Alioto won't even say how many times she failed the California bar examination before she finally was licensed to practice law. "Consider it to be several," said the antidiscrimination lawyer and daughter of the late San Francisco mayor and famed antitrust lawyer, Joseph Alioto. "And understand," she quickly added, "that for the last two years in a row I have been nominated as a national trial lawyer of the year."

Compared to Confederate contemporaries Gen. "Stonewall" Jackson or President Jefferson Davis, Secretary of State Judah P. Benjamin is relatively unknown. A Jewish man raised in Charleston, S.C., who entered Yale Law School at 14 and became a U.S. senator, he was appointed by Davis as his attorney general in 1861. Benjamin, assisted by his shrewd intellect and gifts as an orator, was rumored to have eventually masterminded the assassination of Abraham Lincoln through Confederate spy rings.