Trial Class: Live Online Summer AG 2020

Graham Downey holds a J.D. from Yale Law School and a 99th-percentile LSAT score.

Graham is driven, in large part, by a love for food—when he’s not teaching the LSAT, you can usually find him snacking or thinking about food policy. But Graham’s appetite for knowledge is nearly as insatiable as his love for pizza. That’s why he loves to teach—he loves learning from his students and helping them explore new ways of understanding the world. He especially loves teaching the LSAT because it demands an unusual but powerfully rigorous way of thinking.

Graham followed a conventional pre-law path at Virginia Tech: he majored in political science and minored in both math and philosophy. After graduation, he moved to Jackson, Mississippi to teach as part of the first-ever group of FoodCorps service members. In Mississippi, he built school gardens and taught elementary school students about healthy eating.

After two years of teaching, Graham headed to Yale Law, where he co-founded the Yale Food Law Society. This means he spent a considerable portion of his law school career inviting fancy people to campus and hosting potlucks. The rest of his time was dedicated to clinics, including the Community Economic Development Clinic, and purely theoretical courses like “Justice” and “History of Political Economy” and “Tax.” Upon graduation, Graham received a Heyman Fellowship to work at the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Since the end of his fellowship, he has divided his time between travel, reading, writing, community organizing, and teaching.