Claire Priest named the Simeon E. Baldwin Professor of Law

Claire Priest, newly named as the Simeon E. Baldwin Professor of Law, 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, Priest 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. She 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.

Priest 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. 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.”