Who We Are

Kate Braner

Executive Director

Law School Room J33
203-436-3520
katherine.braner@yale.edu

Prior to joining the Liman Center, Katherine Braner ’93 was the Interim Public Defender of the San Diego County Office of the Public Defender where she promoted excellence in holistic indigent criminal defense and sought systemic criminal legal reform. For close to thirty years, she served in that office in many roles, including as a trial attorney, Recruitment Coordinator, Attorney Supervisor, Chief of Development and Training, and Chief of the Primary Public Defender. To respond to the negative impact a conviction record can have on a person’s quality of life, Braner created a comprehensive criminal record relief program that won national recognition. The Fresh Start Program was designed to educate and aid community members in removing the barriers to employment, housing, education, and voting, which are often the consequence of arrests and convictions Lawyers working with the program have represented more than 10,000 individuals and achieved forms of relief for clients in 99 percent of the cases filed. An advocate on behalf of victims of human trafficking, Braner represented the first person in California who succeeded in having her criminal record erased under a 2017 state vacatur law. The law recognizes the injustice of criminalizing victims of human trafficking for behavior manipulated and controlled by traffickers. It offers human trafficking victims a chance to vacate, or clear, their records upon showing a nexus between the conviction and their victimization. Braner has also been an educator in the many areas in which she is an expert, including the vacatur process, access to justice, and legal protections for human trafficking victims. From 2020 to 2022, Braner and the San Diego Public Defender Office hosted Liman Fellow Kelley Schiffman ’18, whose project focused on implementing California’s law enabling eligible individuals to be removed from the sex offender registry. Braner received her Bachelors’ degree from Bowling Green State University, graduating summa cum laude with honors in 1990.

Marilyn Wilkes

Director of Communications

203-415-4712
marilyn.wilkes@yale.edu

Wilkes leads the Liman Center’s communications efforts. Prior to joining the Liman Center, she worked as the director of communications for Yale’s MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies. Wilkes graduated from the University of California at Berkeley with a degree in mass communication and earned an MBA from the University of New Haven, where she currently teaches a course on the principles of communications.

Ibrahim Diallo

Curtis-Liman Fellow

ibrahim.diallo@yale.edu

Prior to joining the Liman Center as the 2024-25 Curtis-Liman Fellow, Ibrahim Diallo clerked for the Second Circuit Court of Appeals and the Federal District Court for the District Court of Connecticut. He worked for two years as a staff attorney practicing labor law with the New York Taxi Workers Alliance (NYTWA).

Diallo graduated from Trinity College in 2011 with a B.A. in International Relations and completed his J.D. at Columbia Law School in 2020, where he was named a Lowenstein Public Interest Fellow. While in law school, Diallo founded an externship program for law students to work with the NYTWA. Among other law school honors, he received the Constance Baker Motley Prize, the Samuel I. Rosenman Prize for Academic Excellence in Public Law, and the Emil Schlesinger Labor Law Prize.

While a law student, Ibrahim also spent a summer working at the Federal Defenders Office in New Haven. The Curtis-Liman Fellowship enables him to return to that office to build on the work of past Fellows Hannah Duncan and Elizabeth Clarke, while also engaging in research and teaching through the Liman Center.

Laura Fernandez

Senior Liman Fellow in Residence

laura.fernandez@yale.edu

Fernandez is a Clinical Lecturer in Law and Research Scholar in Law at Yale Law School, in addition to being Senior Liman Fellow in Residence. Her research focuses on questions of prosecutorial power, ethics, and accountability. Before joining Yale Law School, she was Senior Counsel at Holland & Knight, LLP, where she worked as a full-time member of the Community Services Team. Laura clerked for the Honorable Jack B. Weinstein of the Eastern District of New York, and was an E. Barrett Prettyman Fellow at Georgetown Law Center, where she obtained her LL.M. She holds an A.B. in Literature from Harvard College, a J.D. from Yale Law School.

Full Biography³

Dwayne Betts

Senior Liman Scholar

reginald.betts@yale.edu

Betts ’16 is a poet and lawyer. A 2021 MacArthur Fellow, he is the CEO of the Freedom Reads, an organization that transforms prison cellblocks into Freedom Libraries. A Senior Liman Scholar for more than 20 years, he has used his poetry and essays to explore the world of prison and the effects of violence and incarceration on American society. The author of a memoir and three collections of poetry, he has transformed his latest collection of poetry, the American Book Award-winning Felon, into a solo theater show that explores the post-incarceration experience and lingering consequences of a criminal record through poetry, stories, and engaging with the timeless and transcendental art of papermaking. In 2019, Betts won the National Magazine Award in the Essays and Criticism category for his NY Times Magazine essay that chronicles his journey from prison to becoming a licensed attorney. He has been awarded a Radcliffe Fellowship from Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Emerson Fellow at New America, and most recently a Civil Society Fellow at Aspen. Betts holds a J.D. from Yale Law School, was a Liman Fellow in 2016, and has been an affiliated Liman Research Scholar since 2020.

Full Biography⁴

Natalia Friedlander

Senior Research Affiliate

natalia.friedlander@yale.edu

Friedlander ’18 was the first Resnik-Curtis Fellow and then a staff attorney with the Rhode Island Center for Justice. There, she founded the Center’s criminal justice team and challenged unjust conditions of confinement, denial of healthcare, and other abuses in the criminal justice system. Now a Visiting Clinical Lecturer in Law, Associate Research Scholar in Law, and Robert M. Cover Clinical Teaching Fellow at Yale Law School, her prior work includes Prisoners’ Legal Services of Massachusetts, the New Haven Legal Assistance Association, and the Jerome N. Frank Legal Services Organization at Yale Law School. Friedlander holds a J.D. from Yale Law School, which recognized her with the Stephen J. Massey Prize for client advocacy and community service, and a B.A. from Brown University. Before law school, Natalia worked for several years in the field of domestic and international public health.

Brian Highsmith

Senior Research Affiliate

brian.highsmith@yale.edu

Brian Highsmith ’17 began work with the Liman Center as a Fellow in Residence in early 2020 at the end of a two-year Skadden Fellowship with the National Consumer Law Center that worked to challenge unaffordable financial obligations imposed on poor families as a result of their contact with the criminal system. He started a Ph.D. in government and social policy at Harvard in the fall of 2020, with a research focus on the fiscal pressures governments impose upon communities, and how those practices are often driven by local budgets that rely on regressive revenue sources such as fines and fees assessed through local policing and criminal systems. Highsmith has remained affiliated with the Liman Center, joining in organizing a series of Liman-hosted webinar sessions about the intersections of public finance and criminal punishment, as well as planning the 2023 colloquium, “Budgeting for Justice: Fiscal Policy and Monetary Sanctions.” For these projects, Highsmith has drawn on his experience working (both before and after law school) on domestic economic policy in Washington, D.C. — including as an advisor at President Barack Obama’s National Economic Council, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, and the office of Sen. Cory Booker ’97. This fall, Highsmith began as an Academic Fellow with Harvard Law School’s new Program on Law and Political Economy. He remains an affiliate of the Liman Center and is writing his dissertation while preparing to go on the law teaching market.

Jonathan Petkun

Senior Research Affiliate

jonathan.petkun@yale.edu

Petkun ’19 is an Associate Professor of Law at Duke Law School, where he teaches civil procedure as well as a seminar on access to justice. In his research, Jon uses his training as an economist to empirically study the legal and economic organization of large public institutions, especially federal and state courts and the U.S. military. With respect to courts, Petkun is interested in how court rules and norms affect litigants’ access. His current projects include a study of federal judicial administration—with an emphasis on the diversity of judges’ administrative roles and the enormous “off-the-bench” influence they wield in policy matters unrelated to any adjudication—as well as a study of the uses and limits of empirical research on civil litigation and procedure. Petkun is a graduate of Yale Law School and holds a Ph.D. in economics from MIT. Prior to his start at teaching, Petkun served as a Senior Liman Research Affiliate (and continues that affiliation) and clerked for federal judges on the District of Connecticut and the D.C. Circuit. Before his academic career, Petkun served as a Marine in both Iraq and Afghanistan.