At the commencement ceremony on May 26 in New Haven, Yale University awarded an honorary Doctor of Laws degree to former Stanford Law School Dean John Hart Ely in honor of his contributions to the field of constitutional law. 

Ely, who graduated from Yale Law School in 1963, was described in the Yale Alumni Bulletin as the “author of some of the most influential legal writings of the second half of the 20th century.” His book, Democracy and Distrust: A Theory of Judicial Review (Harvard University Press, 1980), won an Order of the Coif prize and changed the way that lawyers and scholars think about the Supreme Court’s role: Ely wrote that the Court, instead of serving as an independent source of moral and political values, should primarily concern itself with guaranteeing that our democracy remains open and fair. Many of his other works are considered classics of constitutional law scholarship. 

Ely was a law clerk to Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren and became the youngest staff member on the Warren Commission, which investigated the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Prior to his current position as Richard A. Hausler Professor of Law at the University of Miami, he was a faculty member at Yale and Harvard Law Schools in addition to being Stanford’s Richard E. Lang Professor of Law and serving as the School’s Dean from 1982 to 1987. 

At the Yale graduation ceremony, the citation on his honorary degree was read to the crowd: “Yours is the work that sets the standard for constitutional scholarship in our generation. With forceful argument and impeccable scholarship, you have given clarity to our concept of democracy, by exploring when and how the Supreme Court should exercise its extraordinary power to declare legislation unconstitutional.”