Cecilia A. Silver is the inaugural Director of Legal Research and Writing and a Lecturer in Law and Senior Research Scholar in Law at Yale Law School. She is responsible for developing and leading the legal research and writing program.
Silver brings extensive teaching and litigation experience to her position. Before joining Yale Law School, Silver was an Assistant Professor of Legal Writing at Brooklyn Law School, where she helped design the progression of the first-year legal writing curriculum and create the Gateway to Lawyering course. As a Senior Lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School from 2013 to 2019, Silver worked to revamp the first-year Legal Practice Skills course, taught Civil Pretrial Litigation, and pioneered the role of Writing Specialist. From 2011 to 2013, she was an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Lawyering Skills and Legal Writing at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law while serving as Senior Counsel in the New York City Law Department’s Special Federal Litigation Division. Before that, she clerked for Judge Thomas P. Griesa in the Southern District of New York and practiced complex commercial and intellectual property litigation at Weil, Gotshal & Manges LLP. While in practice, Professor Silver acted as lead counsel on more than 40 cases, handling all facets of trial preparation. She achieved favorable results for several pro bono clients, including obtaining a $750,000 verdict in an excessive-use-of-force trial and successfully briefing and arguing international and interstate child custody disputes before the Second Circuit and New York Appellate Division.
A first-generation lawyer, Silver is committed to increasing access to the legal profession. She has participated in SEO’s Law Institute for over a decade and teaches in Yale Law School’s Access to Law School and Launchpad Scholars pipeline programs.
She also contributes to the broader legal writing community. A regular presenter at legal writing conferences, her scholarship focuses on legal writing pedagogy, with an emphasis on visual rhetoric and multimodal communication. Silver is the Editor in Chief of the Legal Writing Institute’s Monograph Series and a member of its Teaching Resources Committee.
Silver graduated from Princeton University cum laude with an A.B. in Art and Archaeology, earned her Master of Studies in History of Art and Visual Culture with distinction from Oxford University, and received her J.D. from Georgetown University Law Center. At Georgetown, Silver served as a Law Fellow teaching legal writing and was an Executive Editor of The Tax Lawyer.
