Ibrahim Diallo (2025-2026), the 2024-2025 Curtis-Liman Fellow, will become a senior fellow in residence. Diallo co-teaches the Liman Workshop, collaborates with the clinical program, and works at the Office of the Federal Public Defender for the District of Connecticut. He graduated from Trinity College in 2011 with a B.A. in International Relations and from Columbia Law School in 2020. In law school, Diallo was named a Lowenstein Public Interest Fellow, founded an externship program for law students to work with the New York Taxi Workers Alliance (NYTWA), and won the Constance Baker Motley Prize, the Samuel I. Rosenman Prize for Academic Excellence in Public Law, and the Emil Schlesinger Labor Law Prize. After graduation, he was a staff attorney with the NYTWA and clerked for the U.S. District Court for the District of Connecticut and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.
Laura Fernandez ’02 (2014–present) is a senior Liman fellow in residence, clinical lecturer in law, and research scholar in law at Yale Law School. 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. Fernandez clerked in 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 and a J.D. from Yale Law School.
Pardiss Kebriaei (2023–2024), as a senior attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), Kebriaei has worked on issues of civil and human rights for more than 20 years. For the past 10 years, her work has turned increasingly toward domestic prisons, including challenges to end solitary confinement and other inhumane conditions and sentences, including life sentences. Kebriaei’s commentary and scholarship on human rights and incarceration have appeared in magazines and journals including Harper’s Magazine, The Nation, Rolling Stone, The Guardian, and the Yale Law & Policy Review and in the book Drones and the Future of Armed Conflict: Ethical, Legal, and Strategic Implications (University of Chicago Press, 2015). At the Liman Center, her research will include interdisciplinary work on the individual and collective health impacts of mass incarceration in the U.S. She will also contribute to Liman Center research and public education projects on solitary confinement and co-teach the Spring 2024 Liman Workshop.
Grace Li (2021–2023) has worked on a variety of projects since joining the Liman Center in 2021. She has co-taught the Liman Workshop, Imprisoned: From Construction to Abolition, supervised students making a Freedom of Information Act request related to the federal Bureau of Prison’s release to home confinement of individuals at risk of COVID, and contributed to the 2022 solitary confinement report and the development of a new digital dashboard, Seeing Solitary.
Brian Highsmith ’17 (2020–2022) remains an affiliate of the Liman Center. He has been central to the Center’s organization of a series of webinars on Fines, Fees, and Government Funding, which aim to bring together experts in public finance and in monetary sanctions to remedy the unjust use of money as punishment. He is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Government and Social Policy at Harvard University, and serving as a Fellow in Law, Ethics, and Public Policy at the Princeton University School of Public and International Affairs. Highsmith is also centrally involved in planning the April 2023 Liman Colloquium, Budgeting for Justice.
Jonathan Petkun ’19 (2020–2022) worked with Judith Resnik to explore how publicly available data can shed light on the structure and practices of the federal courts, and how data collection and dissemination could be improved to advance this understanding. Petkun is especially interested in how the legal and economic organization of large public institutions in the U.S.—particularly the military and state and federal courts—affect the lives of individuals who participate in them. Still an affiliate of the Liman Center, he is now an Associate Professor of Law at Duke Law School.
Zal Shroff (2020–2021) was central to the Liman Center’s efforts to get information to detainees in Connecticut about their eligibility to vote and to get their ballots counted. He was also one of the supervisors for clinical students in the Criminal Justice Advocacy Clinic. That work helped to obtain home confinement for people held at Danbury and to implement the settlement of a class action lawsuit challenging the Bureau of Prisons’ response to the COVID-19 pandemic. He also worked on analyzing data on the use of solitary confinement. He is currently a Senior Staff Attorney at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay area.
Alexandra Harrington ’14 (2018–2020) supervised students working on projects related to criminal justice reform and co-taught the Liman Workshop. Prior to the Liman Center, she worked at the Connecticut Division of Public Defender Services in the Innocence Project/Post-Conviction Unit, where she helped to shape and coordinate the Division’s representation of individuals who were sentenced as juveniles in adult court to lengthy prison terms. Her work grew out of a law school project with the Lowenstein International Human Rights Clinic advocating for fair sentencing and second-look review for these individuals. Harrington is an Associate Professor, Director of the Criminal Justice Advocacy Clinic, and Director of the Innocence and Justice Project at the University at Buffalo School of Law.
Kristen Bell (2016–2018) collaborated with faculty, directors of state prison systems, and students to research the number of people held in solitary confinement as a Senior Liman Fellow in Residence. She also structured and supervised student research projects related to criminal law; cotaught a seminar on imprisonment, fines, and fees; and was an active participant in the biweekly Legal Theory Workshop. Prior to her fellowship, as a student at Stanford Law School, she interned at the Southern Center for Human Rights and the Center for Death Penalty Litigation, taught seminars on mass incarceration at a state prison, and participated in the Three Strikes Project and Supreme Court Litigation Clinic. She is now currently an Assistant Professor at the University of Oregon School of Law.
Sarah Baumgartel (2015–2016) helped supervise the early stages of the Criminal Justice Clinic’s parole study when she was the Senior Liman Fellow in Residence. The clinic had undertaken this study as part of the governor’s Second Chance Society initiative, which was aimed at reforming the state’s criminal justice system and reducing the prison population. Prior to her fellowship, she was an Assistant Federal Defender with the Federal Defenders of New York. She was also a Lecturer in Law at Columbia Law School from 2014 to 2015. Baumgartel is currently an attorney with Federal Defenders of New York.
Megan Quattlebaum ’10 (2013–2014), who had also been a Liman Law Fellow, focused on prisons and the criminal justice system as a Senior Liman Fellow in Residence. Quattlebaum co-taught the Liman Workshop and supervised students in the Liman Practicum. Projects included research on the regulation of long-term isolation in prisons and gender disparities in the federal correctional system. As a Liman Fellow in 2010, Quattlebaum worked at the Neighborhood Legal Services Association in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where she developed and implemented a program to provide civil legal services for people with criminal records. Quattlebaum is currently the Director of the Council of State Governments Justice Center in New York City.
Sia Sanneh ’07 (2011–2013) continued to work on Doherty’s project examining how state ethics regimes might be applied to address instances of documented prosecutorial misconduct. She supervised students undertaking a survey of the regulation of long-term isolation in the fifty states and the federal prison system. She also worked on a project addressing the parental rights of incarcerated women in Connecticut. Students produced a self-help manual that explained state policies and how the family law system works. Prior to that, as a Liman Fellow in 2007, she studied the collateral consequences of school-based arrests. Sanneh is currently a Senior Attorney at Equal Justice Initiative, in Montgomery, Alabama.
Nina Rabin ’03 (2012–2013) helped teach the workshop Crime and Migration, which analyzed the treatment of noncitizens in the criminal justice system, the extent to which immigrations violations are and should be treated as criminal violations, and the degree to which the form and function of our immigration and criminal justice systems are separate versus intertwined. She also co-taught a workshop exploring the concept of borders and how, in various contexts, law, political orders, and social movements construct, invoke, rely on, and relax borders. Rabin is the Director of the Immigrant Family Legal Clinic at UCLA Law.
Fiona Doherty ’99 (2011) was the first Senior Liman Fellow in Residence. With support from the Vital Projects Fund, she joined the Liman Program in the spring semester of 2011 to expand work related to the criminal justice system. Doherty explored the nature of probation conditions and the proportionality of sanctions for violations. She also examined another set of questions related to how classification, punishment, and grievance mechanisms work within prisons, and how students and faculty might contribute to improving those processes. In conjunction with current and former fellows, she considered how to address administrative segregation, supermax, and death row. Doherty is currently Clinical Professor of Law and Director of the Jerome N. Frank Legal Services Organization at Yale Law School.
