Immigrant of the Day: Guido Calabresi (Italy)

Guido Calabresi (born October 14, 1932, Milan, Italy) is a U.S. legal scholar and judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. Former Dean of Yale Law School, Calabresi is considered one of the founders of the modern field of law and economics.

Calabresi is the son of the late cardiologist Massimo Calabresi and European literature scholar Bianca Maria Finzi-Contini Calabresi. His parents, active in the resistance against Italian fascism, eventually fled Milan for New Haven, immigrating to the United States in 1939.

Guido Calabresi received his B.S. summa cum laude from Yale in 1953, majoring in economics. He was a Rhodes Scholar, studying at Oxford, which awarded him a B.A. with First Class Honors in 1955. Calabresi received his law degree magna cum laude from Yale Law School in 1958, graduating first in his class, and was also a law review member as Note Editor of the Yale Law Journal.

Following graduation from law school, Calabresi served as a law clerk for U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Hugo Black.   He also earned a M.A. in politics, philosophy, and economics from the University of Oxford.

Calabresi joined the faculty of the Yale Law School upon completion of his Supreme Court clerkship, becoming the youngest ever full professor at the Yale Law School, and was Dean from 1985 to 1994. He now is Sterling Professor Emeritus of Law and Professorial Lecturer in Law at Yale.

In 1994, President Bill Clinton nominated Calabresi to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and he was confirmed by the Senate. Among Calabresi's expansive group of former students are Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, feminist legal scholar Catherine MacKinnon, Harvard Law School professor Richard H. Fallon, Jr., and Kenji Yoshino. (I am pleased to say that my colleague Chris Elmendorf served as a law clerk to Judge Calabresi.).

In 2006, Yale created the Guido Calabresi Professorship of Law, with Kenji Yoshino serving as the inaugural holder of the chair.

Judge Calabresi is the author of four books and more than 100 articles. Click here for his profile on the Yale Law School website.

KJ