Mount Holyoke Becomes 10th School to Support Liman Undergraduate Summer Fellowships

Professors Brett Dignam and Michael Graetz, longtime Yale Law School faculty and now faculty emeriti at Columbia Law School, have enabled the Arthur Liman Center for Public Interest Law to expand its undergraduate fellowship program to include Mount Holyoke College, from which Dignam graduated in 1972. Beginning in 2025–2026, Mount Holyoke students will be able to apply for a Liman Fellowship to spend their summer at public interest organizations.

“A recent trip to the Mount Holyoke campus and the energy I experienced in classrooms with students interested and engaged in thinking about social justice sparked this idea,” Dignam said. “The Liman community provides a unique opportunity to join a network of people who are determined to be part of their generation’s quest for a world that prioritizes justice.”

Dignam, a Los Angeles native, worked in theater after graduating from Mount Holyoke and before attending the University of Southern California (USC) Law School. At USC, she was a student of Dennis Curtis, who had begun Yale Law School’s clinical program in 1970 and thereafter launched a post-conviction justice clinic at USC. Dignam was also a student of Judith Resnik, then a beginning faculty member at USC. After Dignam moved to the East Coast, she became a faculty member at Yale in its clinical program, the Jerome N. Frank Legal Services Organization, which she later headed. She directed the Prison Project and inspired legions of students to work on behalf of people with little access to representation. After moving to Columbia, she was Director of its Challenging the Consequences of Mass Incarceration Clinic and then from 2018 to 18 2021, she served as its inaugural Vice Dean for Experiential Learning. 

With her students at both law schools, Dignam generated landmark victories. They established that Scott Lewis, a man from New Haven, Connecticut, was wrongfully convicted. He was freed after two decades of incarceration, as portrayed in the documentary 120 Years. Dignam and her students also spent years showing the harms of profound isolation and, in the Reynolds litigation, established that subjecting individuals to the form of lifetime solitary confinement in Connecticut violated federal constitutional law.

Graetz, a graduate of the University of Virginia School of Law, taught at the USC Law School before joining the Yale Law School faculty, where he anchored its tax offerings. In addition, Graetz joined Professors Jerry Mashaw and Ian Shapiro in teaching seminars on social welfare and policy. In 2009, he became a member of the Columbia faculty as the Columbia Alumni Professor of Tax Law; he continues to teach seminars at Yale as Professor Emeritus. Graetz was at the U.S. Department of Treasury from 1990 to 1992, where he served as Special Counsel and Deputy Assistant Secretary for Tax Policy. In 2013, he was awarded the National Tax Association’s Daniel M. Holland Medal for lifetime achievement in the study of the theory and practice of public finance, and in 2021, he received the Tax Foundation’s Distinguished Service Award in recognition of his contributions to the field of tax policy. His most recent books are “The Power to Destroy: How the Antitax Movement Hijacked America” (Princeton University Press, 2024) and “The Wolf at the Door: The Menace of Economic Insecurity and How to Fight It” (with Ian Shapiro, Harvard University Press, 2020).

Mount Holyoke President Danielle R. Holley celebrated the new fellowship. 

“With an emphasis on experiential learning and industry-specific initiatives, Mount Holyoke students can gain experience in public interest law at organizations throughout the United States,” Holley said. “Leaning into the true interdisciplinary nature of our curriculum, students will engage former and current Fellows, scholars, lawyers, social scientists, and other experts to understand issues in criminal and civil law reform and in legal education.”

Mount Holyoke College joins Barnard, Brown, Bryn Mawr, Harvard, Morehouse, Princeton, Spelman, Stanford, and Yale in the Liman Undergraduate Summer Fellowship Program. Since 1997, when the program was created to honor Arthur Liman’s commitment to Harvard’s Phillips Brooks House, more than 700 undergraduates from Ivy League institutions, schools once known as the Seven Sisters, and historically Black colleges have served as Summer Fellows, working with nonprofits and state and local government agencies throughout the United States.