Osler's Razor

Usually on Wednesdays, I profile my fellow classmates in the Yale Law School Class of 1990. However, I was digging through old files yesterday and found a binder full of notes from 2001. Judge Nancy Gertner had invited me back to Yale Law to participate in the sentencing class I had been a part of as a student. I would say "help teach" if that was true, but I was still mostly learning! 

In the file, I found a list of the students in that class. Today, I'm doing brief profiles on some of them (the first five alphabetically!). These are folks ten years or so behind my class, so they are at a slightly but significantly different point in life. It's pretty incredible that these five accomplished individuals are literally just the first five people alphabetically....

Pictured at the right is Hon. Leslie Abrams Gardner, who was then a second-year student coming from Brown undergrad. She returned to Atlanta after school and worked in the private sector and then as a federal prosecutor. She was appointed to the US District Court in 2014 by President Obama, and confirmed in a 100-0 vote in the Senate. Her sister Stacey (also a YLS grad) is better known, but Judge Gardner has made her own mark on the bench and in her community.


Gabriel Bankier-Plotkin was a second-year also coming from Brown who had worked with homeless teens in his home state of Wisconsin before law school. After law school, he headed for Chicago and worked as a federal defender and then in private practice in criminal defense. Now he is the Chief Operating Officer for Tradewater, which develops high-value projects that reduce greenhouse gas. It's rare to see a change quite so sharp-- from criminal justice to environmental work-- but apparently it can be done!

Laura Fernandez (pictured below) came to Yale Law from Harvard after growing up in Tampa as the daughter of Cuban exiles. After law school, she clerked for Hon. Jack Weinstein in the Eastern District of NY (his writing is so good that I have one of his opinions as the very last case in my casebook).  From there, she served as a senior counsel at Holland & Knight before returning to Yale Law, where she is a Clinical Lecturer in Law, Research Scholar in Law, and a Senior Liman Fellow. Her work centers on prosecutorial practices and ethics-- right in my field!


Peter Hennigan was a third-year student coming in with an undergrad degree from Carleton and a Ph.D. from Cornell. After law school, he went on to clerk here in Minnesota for 8th Circuit Judge (and former Sentencing Commission Chair) Diane Murphy and for 2nd Circuit Judge Ralph Winter. He has worked for United Health Care and several firms in Minneapolis, and now is counsel at Maslon LLC. His office is only four blocks away from my own!

 David Jaros grew up in Western Massachusetts and came to Yale with degrees from Swarthmore and Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. He described coming to Yale Law as a fulfillment of "his lifelong dream of attending a school with no grades."  He was no slacker, though. He clerked for Hon. Allyne Ross in the E.D.N.Y., and then worked for five years at the Bronx defenders office, where he ended up as the legal director. He is now Professor of Law at the University of Baltimore, and teaches and writes in the exact same field as I do. And Laura Fernandez. But, since what we have in common is a long-ago sentencing class, that should not be surprising.

Believe me, there are a lot of other interesting folks in this group-- this is just the first five! In fact, two of the others-- Bill Fick and Daniel Marx-- formed a firm with Judge Gerter (of counsel), and have had a remarkable impact in Boston. Among other cases, they were co-counsel in the Boston Marathon bombing case of US v. Tsarnaev. Here is the firm's website cover photo of the three of them confidently striding down a Boston street: