The Louis D. Brandeis School of Law at the University of Louisville will present its highest honor to U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor (ΦΒΚ, Princeton) in February 2025. Sotomayor will be the seventh Supreme Court justice honored with the medal, following Harry Blackmun, Stephen Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsberg, Elena Kagan, Sandra Day O’Connor, and John Paul Stevens, all of whom are also ΦΒΚ members. Sotomayor’s commitment to public service reflects many of the values for which Louis D. Brandeis (ΦΒΚ, Harvard) is most known and serves as a model for Brandeis Law students.
Mercer University senior Jamyah Janise Combs (ΦΒΚ, Mercer) has been awarded a CDC John R. Lewis Undergraduate Public Health Scholars (Lewis Scholars) position at the University of Pittsburgh this summer. The Pitt Public Health Undergraduate Scholars Program aims to advance health equity by increasing public health workforce diversity and is designed to encourage historically underserved college students to consider careers in public health. A global health major with an anthropology and sociology double-minor, Combs plans to attend Emory University Rollins School of Public Health to pursue a Master of Public Health degree after her graduation from Mercer.
While competing in men’s gymnastics for the College of William & Mary over the past four years, Alek Kuzmenchuk (ΦBK, William & Mary) has received internships with the U.S. Department of State and Senate Foreign Relations Committee, served as editor-in-chief of The Monitor: Journal of International Studies, and was selected for the Pamela Harriman Foreign Service Fellowship. Most recently, he was accepted to the Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program. On a Critical Language Scholarship from the State Department, he spent last summer in India and will return for his Fulbright project. Kuzmenchuk graduated in May with a B.A. in international relations.
Beverly Gage (ΦΒΚ, Yale) won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Biography for G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century (Viking, 2022). The book also received the 2022 National Book Critics Circle Award in Biography, the 2023 Bancroft Prize in American History and Diplomacy, and the 43rd LA Times Book Prize in Biography. G-Man was named a Best Book of 2022 by The Atlantic, The Washington Post, and Smithsonian Magazine and a New York Times Top 100 Notable Books of 2022. A reviewer for The American Scholar observes: “Gage has done a service to history with this clear-eyed portrait of a man who was, for better and for worse, very much an American of his century.”