Mount Holyoke joins a law summer fellowship program
Mount Holyoke College has joined the Liman Summer Undergraduate Fellowship program. Students in this program serve as summer fellows, working with nonprofits and state and local government agencies throughout the United States.
Alum Brett Dignam ’72 and Michael Graetz have helped the Arthur Liman Center for Public Interest Law at Yale Law School expand its undergraduate fellowship program to include Mount Holyoke College. Beginning in the 2025–2026 academic year, Mount Holyoke students can apply for a Liman fellowship to spend their summer at public interest organizations.
“A recent trip to the Mount Holyoke campus and the energy I experienced in classrooms with students interested and engaged in thinking about social justice sparked this idea,” Dignam said. “The Liman community provides a unique opportunity to join a network of people who are determined to be part of their generation’s quest for a world that prioritizes justice.”
Mount Holyoke President Danielle R. Holley celebrated the new fellowship. “With an emphasis on experiential learning and industry-specific initiatives, Mount Holyoke students can gain experience in public interest law at organizations throughout the United States,” she said. “Leaning into the true interdisciplinary nature of our curriculum, students will engage former and current fellows, scholars, lawyers, social scientists and other experts to understand issues in criminal and civil law reform and in legal education.”
Mount Holyoke joins Barnard College, Brown University, Bryn Mawr College, Harvard University, Morehouse College, Princeton University, Spelman College, Stanford University and Yale University in the Liman Summer Undergraduate Fellowships program. Since 1997, when the program was created to honor Arthur Liman’s commitment to Harvard’s Phillips Brooks House Association, more than 700 undergraduates from Ivy League institutions, Seven Siblings colleges and universities, and historically Black colleges have served as summer fellows, working with nonprofits and state and local government agencies throughout the United States.
Mount Holyoke College students interested in joining the Liman Fellows cohort should contact Jaime Grillo, associate vice president for career readiness at the Career Development Center.
Dignam, a Los Angeles native, worked in theater after graduating from Mount Holyoke and before attending the University of Southern California (USC) Law School. At USC, she was a student of Dennis Curtis, who had started Yale Law School’s clinical program in 1970. Later, Curtis went on to launch a post-conviction justice clinic at USC. Dignam also studied under Judith Resnik, then a beginning faculty member at USC. Dignam later moved to the East Coast and became a faculty member in the Jerome N. Frank Legal Services Organization, Yale’s clinical program, which she later headed. She directed the Prison Project and inspired legions of students to work on behalf of people with little access to representation.
She moved to Columbia University as director of the Challenging the Consequences of Mass Incarceration Clinic. From 2018 to 2021, she served as the inaugural vice dean for experiential learning. Alongside her students at both law schools, Dignam generated landmark victories. They established that Scott Lewis, a man from New Haven, Connecticut, had been wrongfully convicted. He was freed after two decades of incarceration, as portrayed in the documentary “120 Years.” Dignam and her students spent years exposing the harms of profound isolation, and they proved that subjecting individuals to the form of lifetime solitary confinement used in Connecticut violated federal constitutional law.
Graetz, a graduate of the University of Virginia School of Law, taught at the USC Law School before joining the Yale Law School faculty, where he anchored its tax offerings. In addition, Graetz joined Professors Jerry Mashaw and Ian Shapiro in teaching seminars on social welfare and policy. In 2009, he became a member of the Columbia faculty as the Columbia alumni professor of tax law; he continues to teach seminars at Yale as professor emeritus. His most recent books are “The Power to Destroy: How the Antitax Movement Hijacked America” and “The Wolf at the Door: The Menace of Economic Insecurity and How to Fight It.”
