Connecting Threads: Mentorship and Collaboration at Yale Law School

Gail Falk ’71 moved to New Haven to begin Yale Law School in 1968 — just as the women's rights movement was gaining traction in New England.

With her friends Ann Freedman ’71 and Barbara Brown ’71, Falk started a “Women and Law” organization at the Law School and, with members of New Haven Women’s Liberation, a women’s health group. “We started challenging the stereotypes that professors were using as examples in their classes,” she said. “We had virtual placards on our chests saying, ‘We are interested in women’s rights.’” 

Not everyone welcomed the change Falk and her friends represented. But Thomas Emerson ’31, a Professor of Law and civil liberties expert at Yale Law School, was paying attention to their message. 

In the summer of 1970, Emerson learned that the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) was set to come before Congress. He was approached to write a scholarly examination of the ERA’s possible impacts. 

“Nobody had studied this seriously,” said Falk. “Instead of taking the assignment on himself, he made contact with us and asked if we would work with him on the article.” The three women began meeting with Emerson weekly, and the project became a yearlong seminar. 

Emerson had a quality that felt rare at the time, said Falk: he respected his students as fellow collaborators.

“Once we got started, we were in it as complete equals. It was an example that I carried into my life [and that] shaped my personality. I developed a confidence in my ability to think about serious, important subjects and write about them,” she said. 

In April 1971, Brown, Emerson, Falk, and Freedman published their nearly 100-page article, “The Equal Rights Amendment: A Constitutional Basis for Equal Rights for Women” in the Yale Law Journal. (At Emerson’s suggestion, their names were listed alphabetically, rather than with Professor Emerson’s name first.) When Congress met to consider the Equal Rights Amendment, the article was often cited by advocates in congressional testimony.

The same year saw the Women v. Connecticut lawsuit challenging the illegality of abortion in the state. Falk, then in her third year of law school, helped develop legal strategy for the group’s lawyers, including Catherine (Katie) Roraback ’48, whom Falk had been assisting with representation of Black Panther members. 

Roraback became Falk’s friend and mentor. “There just weren’t that many independent women lawyers around. She wasn’t just a woman lawyer — she had her own office, she was a self-supporting woman, she thought for herself, and was tremendously effective in court,” said Falk. 

It was tough to stay in touch with Roraback and Emerson once Falk moved south, where she eventually worked in the areas of coal miners’ rights and disability rights. But the connections remained. It wasn’t a coincidence that Falk and her husband named their children Tom and Katie. 

Siegel was writing an article titled “Roe’s Roots: The Women’s Rights Claims That Engendered Roe” in 2008 when she read about the Yale Law students, including Falk, who’d led the social movement that galvanized Women v. Connecticut. 

Siegel called Falk and asked whether she had any notes she could share. After rummaging in her basement, Falk produced an “amazing array” of organizing materials. Some of these can be read in Siegel’s Before Roe v. Wade: Voices that Shaped the Abortion Debate Before the Supreme Court’s Ruling (with Linda Greenhouse ’78 MSL). 

Siegel’s writing on reproductive justice draws on the past to address present challenges; to share experience across generations, she regularly works with students and recent alumni. 

Together with her former students Melissa Murray ’02 (now Frederick I. and Grace Stokes Professor of Law at NYU), Serena Mayeri ’01 (Arlin M. Adams Professor of Constitutional Law and Professor of History at Penn Carey Law), and Rachel Tuchman ’17, Siegel filed an amicus brief in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022), arguing that the Equal Protection Clause provides a basis for abortion rights. 

Murray, Mayeri, and Siegel collaborated on a subsequent publication explaining the brief ’s arguments, which was published in the Columbia Journal of Gender and Law in 2023. 

This work grew out of call-and-response across several generations of legal thinkers and writers, which is as it should be, in Siegel’s view. 

When it comes to clinical experiences at Yale Law School, alumni can be generous in offering current students their blueprints for action. 

Swapna Reddy ’16 is a Co-Executive Director (with Conchita Cruz ’16) of the Asylum Seeker Advocacy Project (ASAP), which provides asylum seekers with legal and community support and helps its members navigate the immigration system. The group’s membership — asylum seekers from 175 countries who live in all 50 states and U.S. territories — has reached almost a million in less than 10 years. 

Reddy never intended to start a nonprofit, she said. Though she, Cruz, and fellow students Dorothy Tegeler ’16 and Liz Willis ’17 developed ASAP from the ground up, it wasn’t their idea but that of a woman named Suny Rodriguez, whom they met through a clinic at Yale.

In 2015, the four women were students in the Worker and Immigrant Rights Advocacy Clinic (WIRAC), led by William O. Douglas Clinical Professor of Law Mike Wishnie ’93, when they read that thousands of families were being held in border detention facilities and waiting for trial in Dilley, Texas. The students wanted to put their skills to use in Dilley; Wishnie found funding for the trip. 

In Dilley, the women met Rodriguez and were able to prepare her for her trial, said Reddy. “She said, ‘I was lucky you happened to be here, but what about my friends who are going to trial in the next few weeks?’ She asked us to continue representing the women who were going to trial. We listened and took it step by step from there.” 

All the women the group represented won their cases, said Reddy, and they knew they were onto something. 

Listening, said Reddy, was and is key to ASAP’s mission. It’s a skill she and her co-founders learned from Wishnie. “Mike trained us to be client-centered lawyers and taught us that if the client is asking you to do something different, [you should] listen to them.” 

At the time, all four of the co-founders were very involved in the International Refugee Assistance Project (IRAP), a Yale Law student– founded organization that helps direct legal services to refugees seeking resettlement in the United States. 

Rebecca Heller ’10 was one of five students behind IRAP, and Heller’s support was crucial to ASAP from the beginning, said Reddy. “Rebecca was an immediate and continuous mentor,” she said. “When we realized we were accidentally starting an organization, she was one of the first people we reached out to. And she gave us a lot of guidance along the way.” 

These relationships and mentorships were the opposite of “one and done,” said Reddy. They continue to deepen. ASAP’s board of directors has several Yale Law School alumni and faculty as members; it has many staff members and interns who are Yale Law alumni. Heller frequently collaborates with and assists Reddy, Cruz, and Tegeler with their work. While Willis no longer works at ASAP, the four are still very close, said Reddy, and they get together for meals in New York. 

“There are a lot of courageous, ambitious advocates coming out of Yale all the time — whether it’s someone we’re turning to for advice or someone we meet during the hiring process. Being part of an alumni network humanizes people who have done impossible things. And it helps you think things are possible to achieve. It made a pretty big difference for me,” she said.