Congratulations to Kate Stith, new Acting Dean of Yale Law School!

As has been reported today in the NYTimes, current Yale Law School dean Harold Koh has been nominated as a legal adviser to the State Department.  Taking his place as Acting Dean is the brilliant Kate Stith, criminal law professor and sentencing guru.  As Rick Levin, the President of Yale, noted:

Professor Stith is a highly respected scholar, teacher, and colleague both at the Law School and in the broader University. ... Professor Stith teaches and writes in the areas of criminal law and procedure, comparative criminal law, criminal sentencing, federal criminal prosecution, university governance, government ethics, and congressional budget law. The principal author of Fear of Judging: Sentencing Guidelines in the Federal Courts, which was awarded the Certificate of Merit by the American Bar Association, she is a leader in developing the field of sentencing law, which is at the intersection of substantive criminal law, criminal procedure, constitutional law, and comparative criminal law.

Her current projects include co-authorship of a textbook on federal criminal law and a textbook on criminal procedure. She is an Advisor to the American Law Institute’s Model Penal Code: Sentencing project, and previously served, by appointment of the Chief Justice of the United States, on the Advisory Committee on the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure of the U.S. Judicial Conference. She also serves on the board of advisors of several scholarly journals. In 2008 she completed a term of three years as a Fellow of the Whitney Humanities Center, the last two years on the Center’s Executive Committee. She was appointed by the Governor of Connecticut as a member of the Permanent Commission on the Status of Women, is a past president of the Connecticut Bar Foundation, and is the faculty sponsor of the non-partisan Women’s Campaign School at Yale. She is a member of the American Law Institute and the Council on Foreign Relations, and served as a Trustee of Dartmouth College for more than a decade.

Kate Stith came to Yale Law School as an Associate Professor of Law in 1985, after having served as an Assistant United States Attorney in the Southern District of New York, where she prosecuted white-collar and organized crime. She previously was on the staff of the President’s Council of Economic Advisors, a special assistant to the Assistant Attorney General in charge of the Criminal Division of the U.S. Department of Justice in Washington, and a law clerk to Judge Carl McGowan of the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit and to Justice Byron R. White of the U.S. Supreme Court. She became Professor of Law in 1991, and the Lafayette S. Foster Professor of Law in 1998. She is a graduate of Dartmouth College, the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, and Harvard Law School.

I believe this is the first time Yale Law School has had a woman serve as either Dean or Acting Dean.  It is a move that was long overdue.  Kudos to the Law School and Rick Levin for picking such an accomplished and capable woman for its first female dean!  I hope there will be many more like her.

Comments

[Acting class Los Angeles]

Congratulation Kate Stith, the new Acting Dean. Hope to see you in action. Actually, I want to enroll my son into Yale law school. Thanks for the info and more power to this blog.

-peter