Yale professor and California justice deliver Sibley lectures

Dr. Monica Bell, who serves as an associate professor of law and sociology at Yale University, and California Supreme Court Justice Goodwin Liu presented the 118th and 119th Sibley Lectures virtually during the 2020–21 academic year.

In October, Bell presented “The Case for Racism Response Funds: A Collective Response to Racist Acts,” which was based on an op-ed she published during the summer of 2020.

Bell specializes in criminal justice, welfare law, housing, race and the law, qualitative research methods, and law and sociology. Her recent work has been published in the Yale Law Journal, the Law & Society Review, the Social Service Review and the Annual Review of Law & Social Science. Before joining the Yale Law School faculty, she was a Climenko Fellow and Lecturer on Law at Harvard Law School.

She previously served as a Liman Fellow at the Legal Aid Society of the District of Columbia and as a judicial clerk for Judge Cameron McGowan Currie of the U.S. District Court for the District of South Carolina.

A first-generation college graduate, Bell earned her bachelor’s degree from Furman University, her master’s from University College Dublin, her Juris Doctor from Yale Law School and her Ph.D. from Harvard University.

Liu’s March 2021 lecture was titled “Who’s Going to Law School? Trends in Law School Enrollment Since the Great Recession.”

Lui joined California’s highest court in 2011. Previously, he was an associate dean and professor at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law specializing in constitutional law, education law and policy, and diversity in the legal profession. He continues to teach constitutional law as a visiting professor at both Harvard and Stanford universities.

He obtained his bachelor’s degree from Stanford and attended Oxford University on a Rhodes Scholarship earning his master’s degree. Liu graduated from Yale Law School in 1998, becoming the first in his family to earn a law degree.

A former judicial clerk for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit Judge David S. Tatel, he also worked as special assistant to the deputy secretary of the U.S. Department of Education and practiced law in the Washington, D.C., office of O’Melveny & Myers.

The Sibley Lecture Series, established in 1964 by the Charles Loridans Foundation of Atlanta in tribute to the late John A. Sibley, is designed to attract outstanding legal scholars of national prominence to the School of Law. Sibley was a 1911 graduate of the law school.

Georgia Supreme Court justices present Edith House Lecture

Georgia Supreme Court Justices Carla Wong McMillian (J.D.’98) and Sarah Hawkins Warren served as the School of Law’s 2021 Edith House Lecturers.

Presented in a virtual format, the webinar – set up as a “fireside chat” – gave the two justices an opportunity to discuss their backgrounds, experiences as women in the legal profession and their pathways to Georgia’s highest court.

McMillian was appointed to the Georgia Supreme Court in 2020. She is the first Asian Pacific American to serve on a state’s highest court in the southern United States. She is also the first Asian American to be elected to statewide office in Georgia. Prior to joining the court, McMillian was a jurist on the state’s Court of Appeals. Before joining the bench she was a partner at Sutherland Asbill & Brennan and clerked for Judge William C. O’Kelley of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia.

Warren was appointed to the court in 2018. She previously served as solicitor general for the state of Georgia. Following her graduation from the Duke University School of Law, she served as a law clerk for then-Chief Judge J.L. Edmondson of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit and for Judge Richard J. Leon of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.
She also practiced as a litigation partner in Washington, D.C.

The Edith House Lecture is sponsored by the Women Law Students Association in honor of one of the first female graduates of the School of Law. House, a native of Winder, Georgia, was co-valedictorian of the law class of 1925, the first to graduate women.