Jim Silk is the Binger Clinical Professor Emeritus of Human Rights at Yale Law School, where he taught the Lowenstein International Human Rights Clinic 1999-2022 and was co-director of the Schell Center for International Human Rights 1999-2024. He was the founding director of Yale College's Multidisciplinary Academic Program in Human Rights Studies. In 2015-2016, Jim established and directed JUNCTURE: Explorations in Art and Human Rights. Jim received the Yale Law Women+ Faculty Excellence Award in 2003; the M. Shanara Gilbert Human Rights Award from the Society of American Law Teachers in 2019; and the DeVane Medal, which recognizes a faculty member for distinguished teaching of Yale undergraduates, in 2024. In 2009, Jim was the Bram Fischer Visiting Human Rights Scholar at the University of the Witwatersrand Law School in Johannesburg. As an attorney at a Washington, D.C. firm after law school, he represented a Virginia death row inmate. He directed the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Human Rights 1993-1999. He has a B.A. in economics from the University of Michigan, an M.A. in the humanities from the University of Chicago and a JD from Yale Law School.