Amy Kapczynski ’03 to Join Law School Faculty in January as Associate Professor of Law

Amy Kapczynski ’03 will join the Yale Law School faculty in January 2012 as an Associate Professor of Law. She has taught since 2007 at the University of California at Berkeley Law School, where she is a faculty director of the Miller Institute for Global Challenges and the Law, and a faculty director of the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology. From 2010 to 2011, she served as a Visiting Associate Professor of Law at Yale Law School and Irving S. Ribicoff Fellow in Law. Her research interests center on international law, intellectual property, and global health.

“Amy is one of the finest young scholars in the nation,” said Yale Law School Dean Robert Post ’77. “She brings great strengths to the school in the areas of intellectual property and public health. Her vibrant multi-disciplinarity and her wide-ranging transnational interests excite faculty and students alike.”

Professor Kapczynski earned her J.D. in 2003 from Yale Law School, where she was articles editor of The Yale Law Journal and co-founder and advocacy director of the Yale AIDS Network. She also holds an A.B. summa cum laude in Politics and Women’s Studies from Princeton University. As a Marshall Scholar, she earned an M.Phil in the Sociology and Politics of Modern Society from Cambridge University, and an M.A. in literature from Queen Mary and Westfield College, University of London.

Following law school, she clerked for the Honorable Guido Calabresi ’58 of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and later for the Honorable Sandra Day O’Connor and the Honorable Stephen G. Breyer of the United States Supreme Court.

She was awarded a post-doctoral fellowship at Yale Law School and the Yale School of Public Health.

In 2001, she helped lead efforts that resulted in Yale University and Bristol-Myers Squibb permitting generic competition and providing steep price discounts for an important anti-AIDS drug in South Africa. Drawing on that experience, she co-founded Universities Allied for Essential Medicines with other students in 2002, and she continues as a member of its advisory board.

Professor Kapczynski has published articles on antidiscrimination law, constitutional history, and intellectual property issues. Her recent work includes an edited volume, "Access to Knowledge in the Age of Intellectual Property" (Zone Books, 2010), and an article about dynamics of harmonization and counter-harmonization in international intellectual property law, using the pharmaceutical sector in India as a case study.

Yale will also welcome Professor Kapczynski’s partner to the University community. Ali Miller, a well known scholar and advocate of sexuality and human rights, previously taught at Berkeley Law School and Columbia University. At Columbia, she co-directed the Center for the Study of Human Rights. She has accepted a position as an Assistant Clinical Professor in the School of Public Health. She will also serve as an Associate Scholar for International Human Rights at the Law School and a Lecturer in Global Affairs at the Jackson Institute for Global Affairs at the Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies.