Professors Listokin, Priest, and Rodríguez Receive New Faculty Appointments

The Yale Corporation has voted to approve three new appointments to the Yale Law School faculty. Yair Listokin ’05 has been named the inaugural Shibley Family Fund Professor of Law, Claire Priest ’01 has been named the Simeon E. Baldwin Professor of Law, and Cristina Rodríguez ’00 has been named the Leighton Homer Surbeck Professor of Law.

“We are so happy to provide chairs to these three outstanding faculty,” said Robert Post, Dean of the Law School. “These chairs are given in recognition of their scholarship, leadership, and immense contributions to this place.”

Yair Listokin’s scholarship examines problems in tax law, corporate law, contract law, and bankruptcy law from both empirical and theoretical perspectives. Professor Listokin has been honored with a Milton Friedman Fellowship from the Becker-Friedman Institute at the University of Chicago and has served as a Visiting Professor at Columbia Law School, Harvard Law School, and NYU School of Law. His research has been featured in Fortune, cnn.com, The Boston Globe, and Slate. Recent research projects include an empirical inquiry into the quality and accuracy of disclosure of corporate voting results, a theoretical inquiry into the impact of taxation on the size of the financial sector, and an empirical study of consumer’s implicit understandings of the meaning of contractual silence. Professor Listokin received his J.D. from Yale Law School in 2005, his A.B. (magna cum laude) in Economics from Harvard in 1998, and his Ph.D. in Economics from Princeton in 2002.

The Shibley Family Fund Professor of Law was established to study post-World War II contract developments.

Claire Priest is an expert on the intersection of legal and economic history in the American Colonial and Founding Eras. Prior to coming to Yale in 2009, she was Professor of Law and History at Northwestern University, the Charles Warren Visiting Professor of American Legal History at Harvard Law School, and a visiting Professor at Columbia Law School. Priest has published in the Harvard Law Review, The Yale Law Journal, The Cambridge History of Law in America and Law and History Review (forthcoming). She is currently completing a book manuscript on the legal history of early American property and credit markets, under contract with Princeton University Press.

She received her B.A., J.D., and Ph.D. (History) degrees from Yale University. While at Yale Law School, she served as an Articles Editor and as Symposium Chair for The Yale Law Journal, and was awarded the John M. Olin Prize for the best paper on law and economics, and the Joseph Parker Prize for the best paper on legal history. Her Ph.D. dissertation was awarded the Yale Graduate School’s George Washington Egleston Prize for the best dissertation in American History, and the Economic History Association’s Allan Nevins Prize for the best dissertation in American or Canadian Economic History (2003). After graduating from law school, Priest was a Samuel I. Golieb Fellow at NYU School of Law and served as a law clerk for Judge Jon O. Newman on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.

The Simeon E. Baldwin Professorship was a gift and bequest of Professor Simeon E. Baldwin, B.A. 1861, for “a Professorship of Roman Law, Comparative Jurisprudence, or other branch of advanced legal education, as the faculty of the Law School may recommend.”

Cristina Rodríguez teaches and writes in the areas of constitutional law and theory, immigration law and policy, and administrative law. Rodríguez joined Yale Law School in 2013 after serving as Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Office of Legal Counsel at the U.S. Department of Justice. She was previously on the faculty at the New York University School of Law. She is a non-resident fellow at the Migration Policy Institute in Washington, D.C., and has been a term member on the Council on Foreign Relations and the Henry L. Stimson Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. Her most recent works include “Negotiating Conflict through Federalism” (2014), “Uniformity and Integrity in Immigration Law” (2014); “Regulatory Pluralism and the Interests of Migrants” (2014); “Constraint through Delegation” (2010); “The President and Immigration Law” (2009); and “The Significance of the Local in Immigration Regulation” (2008). She earned her B.A. and J.D. degrees from Yale. While in law school, she served as an Articles Editor on The Yale Law Journal and was awarded the Benjamin Scharps Prize for the best paper written by a third-year student. She also attended Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar, where she received a Master of Letters in Modern History. Following law school, Rodríguez clerked for Judge David S. Tatel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit and for Justice Sandra Day O’Connor of the U.S. Supreme Court.

The Leighton Homer Surbeck Professorship was established by Margaret Surbeck in 2000 to honor the memory of her husband Homer Surbeck ’27, founding member of the law firm of Hughes, Hubbard & Reed, and to reflect Homer Surbeck's lifelong commitment to the highest ideals of the legal profession.