Yale Announces 2002-2003 Knight Journalism Fellowships in Law

Yale Law School has announced the recipients of the Knight Fellowships in Law for Journalists for the 2002-2003 academic year. The fellows are Luiza Chwialkowska, National Post; Charles Savage, The Miami Herald; and Dean Smith, The Charlotte Observer.

Chwialkowska has been a reporter for the National Post newspaper in Canada since 1998. Her last assignment was as Parliamentary bureau reporter in Ottawa, where she handled daily and feature coverage of the Supreme Court of Canada and the federal Justice Department; periodic economic and social policy reporting; and foreign assignments at the G-8 Summit 2000 in Japan, the U.S. Supreme Court, and the United Nations. Prior to that, she was a national news reporter in the paper’s Toronto office. Her previous journalism assignments included nine months with the Ottawa Citizen, a year at The New Yorker magazine as a research assistant and internships with Time magazine, “The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour,” and The New York Times. She holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in economics from Harvard University and completed a semester program in history, economics and politics of the European Union at the Université de Paris.

Savage has been a staff writer with The Miami Herald in Florida since 1999. His most recent assignments included covering Miami-Dade County Public Schools (the nation’s fourth-largest school district), the Florida legislature and Broward County government. He was also part of reporting teams covering the Elian Gonzalez story, for which the paper’s staff won a 2001 Pulitzer Prize in breaking news; the 2000 presidential election and the Florida recount; and a reconstruction of the lives of the September 11 hijackers who trained in south Florida. In addition, he has been a film critic for the Herald’s weekend section and for Knight-Ridder wire service. He holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in English and American literature and language from Harvard University.

Smith, assistant national editor at The Charlotte Observer in North Carolina, has been with the newspaper since 1990. He began as a reporter covering money management, nonprofits and other business issues. He later edited the paper’s Sunday Arts & Books section, and currently concentrates on overseas and business news, including coordinating coverage of the Enron situation. Since 1999, he has also been the Carolinas stringer for The New York Times. In 1995-96, during a leave from the Observer, he wrote for and helped edit Europ, a bilingual political quarterly in Paris, where his reporting assignments took him from London to Istanbul, Naples, Belfast, Berlin and Prague, among other places. Other previous journalism positions included stints at The St. Petersburg Times, The Winston-Salem Journal and USA TODAY. He holds a Bachelor of Music degree from North Carolina School of the Arts.

The Knight Fellowship program brings mid-career journalists to Yale Law School for an academic year to take courses and participate in seminars and other activities that will improve their understanding of legal and policy issues in order to enhance their legal reporting. Fellows who complete the course of study earn the degree of Master of Studies in Law (M.S.L.). The Knight Fellowship at Yale is the only journalism fellowship that offers a master’s degree upon completion of the program.

The fellowship program was established to allow a select group of journalists to step back from the urgency of deadlines and to learn about the law in depth. The fellowship includes a stipend to cover living expenses during the fellowship year, supported by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. In addition, in accordance with the fellowship’s mission to enrich legal reporting, Yale Law School provides full-tuition grants to fellows who return to journalism after completing their year of study.

During the course of the year, fellows receive the basic foundations of a first-year legal education and have the opportunity to take elective courses that focus on their areas of interest. Fellows study alongside students in Yale’s J.D. and LL.M. programs, meet frequently with members of the Law School faculty for informal discussions, organize panel discussions and events for the Law School, and meet as a group with legal experts and other distinguished visitors.

Applications for the 2003-2004 Fellowships in Law for Journalists program will be accepted until January 7, 2003. For further information, please contact Fellowships in Law for Journalists, Yale Law School, P.O. Box 208215, New Haven, CT 06520-8215; gradpro.law@yale.edu; 203 432-1696; or visit the website at www.yale.edu/lawweb/lawschool/gradpro/mslj/.