Yale Law School in the context of "Bill Clinton"

Gerald Rudolph Ford Jr. (born Leslie Lynch King Jr.; July 14, 1913 – December 26, 2006) was the 38th president of the United States from 1974 to 1977. A member of the Republican Party, Ford assumed the presidency after the resignation of Richard Nixon, under whom he had served as the 40th vice president from 1973 to 1974 following the resignation of Spiro Agnew. Prior to that, he served as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from 1949 to 1973.

Ford was born in Omaha, Nebraska, and raised in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He attended the University of Michigan, where he played for the university football team, before eventually attending Yale Law School. Afterward, he served in the U.S. Naval Reserve from 1942 to 1946. Ford began his political career in 1949 as the U.S. representative from Michigan's 5th congressional district, serving in this capacity for nearly 25 years, the final nine of them as the House minority leader. In December 1973, two months after the resignation of Vice President Agnew, Ford became the first person appointed to the vice presidency under the terms of the 25th Amendment. After President Nixon resigned in August 1974, Ford immediately assumed the presidency.

Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton (née Rodham; born October 26, 1947) is an American politician, lawyer, and diplomat. She was the 67th United States secretary of state in the administration of Barack Obama from 2009 to 2013, a U.S. senator representing New York from 2001 to 2009, and the first lady of the United States from 1993 to 2001 as the wife of Bill Clinton. A member of the Democratic Party, she was the party's nominee in the 2016 presidential election, becoming the first woman to win a presidential nomination by a major U.S. political party and the only woman to win the popular vote for U.S. president. However, she lost the electoral college to Republican Party nominee Donald Trump. She is the only first lady of the United States to have run for elected office.

Born in Chicago, Rodham graduated from Wellesley College in 1969 and from Yale Law School in 1973. After serving as a congressional legal counsel, she moved to Arkansas and, in 1975, married Bill Clinton. In 1977, Clinton co-founded Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families, and in 1979 she became the first woman partner at Little Rock's Rose Law Firm. Clinton was the first lady of Arkansas from 1979 to 1981 and again from 1983 to 1992. As the first lady of the U.S., Clinton advocated for healthcare reform. In 1994, her health care plan failed to gain approval from Congress. In 1997 and 1999, Clinton played a leading role in promoting the creation of the State Children's Health Insurance Program, the Adoption and Safe Families Act, and the Foster Care Independence Act. In 1998, Clinton's marital relationship came under public scrutiny during the Clinton–Lewinsky scandal, which led her to publicly reaffirm her commitment to the marriage.

Latin honors are a system of Latin phrases used in some colleges and universities to indicate the level of distinction with which an academic degree has been earned. The system is primarily used in the United States. It is also used in some Southeastern Asian countries with European colonial history, such as Indonesia and the Philippines, and African countries such as Zambia and South Africa, although sometimes translations of these phrases are used instead of the Latin originals. The honors distinction should not be confused with the honors degrees offered in some countries, or with honorary degrees. In countries that use Latin honors, they are normally awarded to undergraduate students earning bachelor's degrees and to law school graduates. They are not usually used for graduate students receiving master's or doctorate degrees.

The Latin honors system has three standard levels (listed in order of increasing merit): cum laude, magna cum laude, and summa cum laude. The regulations of each college or university normally set out criteria that a student must meet in order to obtain a given honor. For example, the student might be required to achieve a specific class ranking, a specific grade point average, submit an honors thesis for evaluation, or be part of an honors program. Each school sets its own standards. Because these standards vary, the same level of Latin honors conferred by different institutions can represent different levels of achievement. Some institutions use non-Latin equivalents, while certain other institutions do not use honors at all, such as Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Yale Law School, and Stanford Law School.

John William Sterling (May 12, 1844 – July 5, 1918) was a founding partner of Shearman & Sterling LLP and major benefactor to Yale University.

James David Vance (born James Donald Bowman, August 2, 1984) is an American politician and author who is the 50th vice president of the United States. A member of the Republican Party, he represented Ohio in the United States Senate from 2023 to 2025.

Born and raised in Middletown, Ohio, Vance enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps in 2003 and was a military journalist throughout his four-year tenure until 2007. He earned a bachelor's degree from Ohio State University and a Juris Doctor from Yale Law School. After briefly working as a corporate lawyer, Vance became a venture capitalist at Peter Thiel's Mithril Capital. In 2016, he published Hillbilly Elegy, a bestselling memoir that brought him national attention.

Walton Hale Hamilton (October 30, 1881 – October 27, 1958) was an American law professor who taught at Yale Law School (1928–1948). In 1919, Hamilton coined the term "institutional economics".

Jacob "Jay" Katz (October 20, 1922 – November 17, 2008) was an American physician and Yale Law School professor whose career was devoted to addressing complex issues of medical ethics and other ethical problems involving the overlaps of ethics, law, medicine and psychology.

Samuel Aaron Moyn (born 1972) is the Chancellor Kent Professor of Law and History at Yale University, previously the Henry R. Luce Professor of Jurisprudence at Yale Law School and Professor of History at Yale University, which he joined in July 2017. He was a professor of history at Columbia University for thirteen years and a professor of history and of law at Harvard University for three years. His research interests are in modern European intellectual history, with special interests in France and Germany, political and legal thought, historical and critical theory, and Jewish studies.

He has been co-director of the New York-area Consortium for Intellectual and Cultural History, is editor of the journal Humanity, and has editorial positions at several other publications.