Category:Famous Yale Alumni

Yale College educated William Howard Taft, George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush before their presidencies; Gerald Ford and Bill Clinton came to the same university through its law school instead. Yale University, in New Haven, Connecticut, has fed the American federal government through those two distinct doors for two centuries, and this category reflects both of them. The membership runs heaviest through law and elected office, with a second concentration in academic economics and a smaller group trained at the School of Drama and the School of Management.

Yale was founded in 1701 and is organized around residential colleges for undergraduates and a set of professional schools that admit graduates of other institutions. That structure explains most of the shape of this category. People who arrived as undergraduates tend to appear here with a Yale bachelor's degree and a career made elsewhere; people who arrived at Yale Law School, the School of Management, the School of Medicine or the School of Drama often did their first degree at Princeton, Stanford, Spelman, Harvard or Brown and came to New Haven for one credential.

Two institutions inside the university recur in these biographies. Skull and Bones, the senior society, appears in the pages of Morrison Waite, William Howard Taft and Stephen A. Schwarzman. The Yale Law Journal appears in Richard Blumenthal's, who edited it. The Sterling Professorship, the university's senior academic rank, is held by William Nordhaus, who took his own bachelor's and master's degrees at Yale and never left.

Yale Law School is the spine of this category. Sonia Sotomayor, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Brett Kavanaugh all hold Yale law degrees and sit together on the current Supreme Court; Kavanaugh is the one of the four who also did his undergraduate work there, reading history before returning for the JD. The bench before them is equally well represented. Potter Stewart graduated from Yale College in 1937 and from Yale Law, and served for twenty-three years. Byron White took his law degree at Yale after playing professional football and clerking. Abe Fortas arrived at Yale Law from Rhodes College, having graduated first in his class in 1930. Sherman Minton came for a Master of Laws after Indiana. Morrison Waite graduated from Yale College in 1837 and became the seventh Chief Justice; William Howard Taft graduated second in his class in 1878 and became the tenth, the only person to hold both the presidency and the chief justiceship.

The advocacy side is here too. Neal Katyal took his JD at Yale and argued as Acting Solicitor General. Anita Hill earned her law degree at Yale before the 1991 confirmation hearings that made her a national figure. Eleanor Holmes Norton took both a master's and a Bachelor of Laws at Yale. John C. Calhoun, the earliest entry in this group, studied at Yale College under Timothy Dwight IV before Litchfield Law School and the vice presidency.

The presidential line runs from William Howard Taft through Gerald Ford, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, with Prescott Bush in the Senate a generation ahead of his son and grandson, and Hillary Clinton taking her law degree at Yale in 1973, two years after her husband entered. J.D. Vance is the most recent addition, coming to Yale Law from Ohio State.

The State Department connection is nearly as dense. Dean Acheson took his bachelor's degree at Yale before Harvard Law and the Truman administration. Cyrus Vance graduated from Yale in 1939 and returned for a law degree. John Kerry read at Yale and debated in the political union. Henry L. Stimson took his Yale degree before Harvard Law, the War Department and oversight of the Manhattan Project. Samantha Power and John Bolton both went from Yale into foreign policy from opposite directions.

On the money side, Janet Yellen took her doctorate in economics at Yale before the Federal Reserve and the Treasury, and Robert Rubin took his law degree there before Goldman Sachs and the Treasury. The Senate and the governorships add Amy Klobuchar, Sheldon Whitehouse, Richard Blumenthal, Cory Booker, Josh Hawley, Michael Bennet, Chris Coons, Ron DeSantis, Stacey Abrams, Ned Lamont and Vivek Ramaswamy.

The economics cluster is the strongest academic signal in this category, and the clearest case is a pair. Douglas Diamond and Philip H. Dybvig both took their doctorates at Yale, and the model they built together carries both their names. William Nordhaus took his bachelor's and master's degrees at Yale and spent his career on its faculty, working on the integration of climate change into long-run macroeconomics. Edmund Phelps came to Yale for graduate work after Amherst. Paul Krugman, George Akerlof and Peter Diamond all read economics at Yale as undergraduates and went to MIT for their doctorates, which is a route worth noticing: for this generation Yale supplied the training and Cambridge, Massachusetts supplied the credential.

The laboratory sciences follow the same graduate-school pattern. Raymond Davis Jr. finished a Yale doctorate in physical chemistry in 1942 and later built the first detector capable of capturing solar neutrinos. John Fenn took his chemistry doctorate at Yale before developing electrospray ionization. Eric Wieschaus came to Yale from Notre Dame for a doctorate in genetics and developmental biology. Alfred G. Gilman took a Yale bachelor's degree in biology and biochemistry in 1962 before the work on G proteins. Brian Kobilka earned his medical degree at Yale, and James Rothman read physics at Yale as an undergraduate and now chairs cell biology there. Francis Collins completed a master's and a doctorate in physical chemistry at Yale before medicine and the Human Genome Project.

The School of Drama and the newsroom supply the last group. Meryl Streep took her Master of Fine Arts at Yale after Vassar. Anderson Cooper read political science and graduated in 1989. Bob Woodward finished at Yale and went into the Navy before The Washington Post. Ronan Farrow took his law degree at Yale, and Mina Kimes read economics there before Bloomberg, Fortune and ESPN. On the business side, Indra Nooyi came to the School of Management in 1978 for a master's in public and private management, Ned Lamont took his own degree there, Jim Chanos later taught there as an adjunct, John Malone read electrical engineering and economics, Joe Tsai took a Yale law degree before Alibaba, and Justin Kan and Emmett Shear met as Yale undergraduates and went on to build Justin.tv and Twitch together.

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