Teaching and Clerkship Next for Outgoing Liman Fellows

Three fellows end their time with the Arthur Liman Center for Public Interest Law this year. The Liman Center shares what they are doing next.

Hannah Duncan ’21

Co-hosted by Yale Law School and the Connecticut Federal Defenders Office, Hannah Duncan ’21 started her Curtis-Liman Fellowship in September 2023. At the Federal Defenders Office, she works with clients serving sentences of supervised release and probation. In addition to direct representation, she has done innovative research about mental health and substance use treatment for justice-involved individuals in Connecticut. She has joined with a cohort of students to interview directors of agencies to which clients are referred as a condition of their release or probation status. In her role as a clinical fellow at Yale Law School, she co-teaches the Liman Workshop and Liman Seminar classes and helps supervise students involved in the Challenging Mass Incarceration Clinic and Mental Health Justice Clinic. After concluding the fellowship term, Duncan will clerk for the Honorable Judge John G. Koeltl in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York.

Brian Highsmith ’17

Brian Highsmith’17 began work with the Liman Center as a Fellow in Residence in early 2020 at the end of his two-year Skadden Fellowship with the National Consumer Law Center. As a Skadden Fellow, he worked on challenges to the unaffordable financial obligations imposed on poor families as a result of their contact with the criminal system. His focus was on commercial bail and the prison phone industries. After starting a Ph.D. in government and social policy at Harvard in the fall of 2020, Highsmith continued work with the Liman Center as an Affiliated Fellow. His research focuses on the fiscal pressures imposed by governments on communities, practices are often driven by localities’ budgets relying on regressive revenue sources such as fines and fees assessed through local policing and criminal systems. Highsmith has joined in organizing a series of Liman-hosted webinar sessions about the intersections of public finance and criminal punishment, as well as planning the 2023 colloquium, “Budgeting for Justice: Fiscal Policy and Monetary Sanctions.” For these projects, Highsmith has drawn on his experience working (both before and after law school) on domestic economic policy in Washington, D.C. — including as an advisor at President Barack Obama’s National Economic Council, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, and the office of Sen. Cory Booker ’97. In the fall, Brian will continue as an Affliated Liman Fellow and start a new position as an Academic Fellow with Harvard Law School’s new Program on Law and Political Economy while he works on his dissertation and prepares to go on the law teaching market.

Grace Li

In her two years with the Liman Center as a Fellow in Residence, Grace Li has enjoyed the opportunity to co-teach the Liman Workshop and Liman Seminar classes. Li has worked with students who helped make a Freedom of Information Act request on behalf of individuals released on confinement due to COVID-19. She also worked on the Center’s report Time-in-Cell 2021 on the use of solitary confinement around the country, on documenting legislatively mandated reporting about the use of solitary confinement, and on developing the website Seeing Solitary. Li’s research agenda includes an article Associations in Prison, forthcoming in the U.C. Irvine Law Review, a book review of Tommie Shelby’s The Idea of Prison Abolition, forthcoming in the Michigan Law Review, and a work-in-progress about the Felony Alternative-to-Incarceration Court in Manhattan. This fall, Li starts in a tenure-track position at the Moritz School of Law at the Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio. She will be in the inaugural cohort of OSU’s Race, Inclusion, and Social Equity (RAISE) Initiative. She will begin as a fellow, focusing on research. After two years, she will become an assistant professor, likely teaching criminal law and a seminar of her design, which will take inspiration from the Liman Workshop, Imprisoned: Construction, Abolition, Alternatives.