Mike Clemente ’16 Wins Judge John R. Brown Award

Yale Law School student Michael Clemente ’16 was recently awarded the Judge John R. Brown Award for his paper titled “A Reassessment of Common Law Protections for ‘Idiots.’” 

The Brown Award is in recognition of Excellence in Legal Writing in American Law Schools. The first place winner is awarded a $10,000 stipend.

Clemente’s paper explores the legal protection prohibiting execution of people with intellectual disabilities in history and today. When the Eighth Amendment was ratified, common law protections categorically forbade the execution of people referred to as “idiots.” On two occasions, the Supreme Court has considered whether these historical protections proscribe executing people with intellectual disabilities today; however, the Court concluded that idiocy protections shielded only the “profoundly or severely mentally retarded.” Clemente’s Note argues that the Court’s historical analysis of idiocy protections was unduly narrow. He reassesses common-law insanity protections for idiots and finds strong evidence that these protections included people with a relatively wide range of intellectual disabilities. Based on this new historical account, the Note argues that there are people with intellectual disabilities on death row today who likely would have been protected from execution in 1791.

Clemente received several other awards for this paper, including a 2015 Burton Award for Distinguished Legal Writing, which honors law school student writers and writers at law firms each year. Clemente also received three awards at Yale Law School for his writing, including the Judge William E. Miller Prize for the best paper concerning the Bill of Rights; the Joseph Parker Prize, for the best paper on a subject connected with legal history or Roman law; and the Michael Egger Prize, for the best student Note or Comment on current social problems. His paper was published in the Yale Law Journal, Volume 124 (Issue 8).