Workshops and Seminars for Students and Faculty

This workshop engages key questions in comparative law, using as focal points the study of Chinese and Islamic law and legal history. Students read examples of influential scholarship in each field both for their importance and as a vehicle for thinking about methodological issues in comparative work in general.  Students also have the opportunity to engage several leading scholars in each field who will present works-in-progress.

FALL 2023 –Professor William Alford, Professor Idriss Fofana, Professor Intisar Rabb
MONDAYS, 3:45-5:45PM, Hauser 102

Monday, September 18: Yutian An, HLS Climenko Fellow, The logic of authoritarian judicial review: How Chinese courts handle lawsuits against the police

Monday, Sept 25 – no class – class moved to Friday, Sept 29

Friday, September 29: 4:00 pm to 6:00 pm  (note different day and time), Justice Mansor Shah, Supreme Court of Pakistan, Cases and Controversies from the Pakistani Supreme Court

Monday, October 2: Rabiat Akande,  S.J.D. ’19, Osgoode Hall Law School, Debating Diya: Indirect Rule and the Transformation of Islamic Law in British Colonial Northern Nigeria

Monday, October 9 – no class – class moved to Tuesday, October 10

Tuesday, October 10:  (note different day – due to the Oct 9 holiday, all classes will follow a Monday schedule on Tues, Oct 10), Tamar Groswald Ozery, Hebrew University, The Holding Foreign Companies Accountable (HFCA) Act: A Critique  [co-authored with Jesse M. Fried]

Monday, October 16: Hassaan Shahawy,  J.D. ’22, Reginald F. Lewis Fellow at Harvard Law School, Human Authority in a Divine Law: Law-Finding vs. Law-Making in Early Islamic Jurisprudence

Monday, October 23: Eric Schluessel, George Washington University History Department, Sino-Islamic Legal Encounters in Xinjiang: What We Learn from Vernacular Comparativism AND Aaron Glasserman, Academy Scholar at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies, The Shari’a-Minded Ethic in Late Qing and Republican China

Monday, October 30: Pierre Legrand, École de Droit de la Sorbonne, Negative Comparative Law: The Sanitization Enterprise

Monday, November 6: Ke Li, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, Bringing the State Back In: Dispute Resolution and Governing Methodologies in the People’s Republic of China

Monday, November 13: Markus Dubber, University of Toronto Law School, New Legal Science

Monday, November 20: Yvonne Tew, LL.M. ’08, Georgetown University Law Center, Strategic Judicial Empowerment

Our sessions will operate on the assumption that all in attendance will have read the paper(s) that form the basis of any given day’s discussion.  If you would like a copy of any paper (which should be available 10 days prior to the session at which it will be discussed) , please contact Emma Johnson.

The Health Law, Policy, Bioethics, and Biotechnology Workshop provides a forum for discussion of new scholarship in these fields from the world’s leading experts. You can visit the Petrie-Flom Center for Upcoming Health Law Workshops. For information about the workshops you can contact David LeBreton.

This seminar compares and contrasts how international law regulates the interactions of nations with how private law regulates the interactions of persons and firms. It will thus consider, for example, analogies and disanalogies between international-law rules protecting territorial sovereignty and private-law rules protecting private property, and the legal obligations of nations and individuals to redress the wrongs they commit. Readings will include published scholarship and works-in-progress.

FALL 2023 – Professors John Goldberg and Gabriella Blum
TUESDAYS,1:30-3:30PM, Hauser 105

Tuesday, September 12th (Remote)
Kirsten Schmalenbach, Paris London University: “The UN’s Tort Liability: Third Party Claims Arising From Peacekeeping Missions”

Tuesday, September 19th
Daryl Levinson, NYU Law

This week’s reading assignment consists of portions of Professor Levinson’s book Law and Leviathan, as follows:

1. Introduction (skim to get a sense of the overall book project)
2. Chapter 6, Personal Morality and Political Justice (pp. 1-9, 19-32 only)
3. Chapter 7, Leviathan: No Body and Everybody (entire)

Tuesday, September 26th
Haim Abraham, UCL Faculty of Laws: “Tort Liability in Warfare: Civilians’ Rights and States’ Wrongs”

Tuesday, October 3rd
Seth Davis, Berkeley Law: “The Grammar of Sovereignty”

Tuesday, October 17th
Rebecca Crootoff, Richmond Law: “War Torts”

Tuesday, October 31st
Jack Goldsmith, HLS: “Contracts: Domestic and International”

Tuesday, November 7th
David Dana, Northwestern Law: “Climate Standing Exceptionalism”

Tuesday, November 14th
Terry Fisher, HLS: “The Quiet Corrosion of the Public/Private Distinction”

Tuesday, November 21st
Larissa Katz, Toronto Law: “Property Within Borders ”

Class is on Tuesdays from 1:30-3:30pm in Hauser 105 (except the first class, which will be via Zoom). Papers should be available for each topic about 10 days prior to the scheduled class. If you would like to request a copy, or for more information on this workshop, please contact Deema Qashat at dqashat@law.harvard.edu. You can also visit our International Law and Private Law page here.

This seminar provides students with an opportunity to engage with ongoing research in the economic analysis of law.

Fall 2023 — Professor Louis Kaplow & Professor Steven Shavell
TUESDAYS,4:00-5:30 PM, HAUSER 102

Sept. 5:            Omri Ben Shahar (Chicago), “Privacy Protection, At What Cost?  Exploring the Regulatory Resistance to Data Technology in Auto Insurance”

Sept. 12:          Ryan Bubb (NYU), “Corporate Social Responsibility Through Shareholder Governance”

Sept. 19:          [Students Only]

Sept. 26:          Jack Goldsmith (Harvard) and Alan Sykes (Chicago), “The California Effect, Process-Based Regulations, and the Dormant Commerce Clause”

Oct. 3:             Hal Scott (Harvard), “The 2023 Banking Crisis and Reforming the Role of Lender of Last Resort”

[Oct. 10:          Classes meet on Monday schedule]

Oct. 17:           Michael Meurer (Boston University), “A New Approach to Patent Reform”

Oct. 24:           Albert Yoon (Toronto), “In the Eye of the Beholder: How Lawyers Perceive Legal Ethical Problems”

Oct. 31:           [Students Only]

Nov. 7:            Roberto Tallarita (Harvard), “Shareholder Preferences on Shareholder Democracy”

Nov. 14:          Jim Greiner (Harvard), “Do Risk Assessment Instruments in the Criminal Justice System Work?  Evidence from an RCT”

Nov. 21:          Kathryn Spier (Harvard) and Rory Van Loo (Boston University), “Foundations of Platform Liability”

Nov. 28:          Kathryn Zeiler (Boston University), “Metaresearch, Psychology, and Law: a Case Study on Implicit Bias”

Also, two evening sessions for the students will be held in Hauser 102 on Thursday, October 12 and Thursday, November 9 from 6:00 p.m. – 9:00 p.m.

The course website is available at: https://canvas.harvard.edu/courses/130322. Select “Syllabus” for papers and the course schedule,  or contact Molly Eskridge.

This workshop examines new ideas at the intersection of law and philosophy. Meetings on alternate Wednesdays will be devoted to discussion of pre-circulated working papers presented by invited authors. These sessions are open to the Harvard community.

Fall 2023: Professor Ryan Doerfler & Professor Benjamin Eidelson
WEDNESDAYS, 3:45-5:45 PM, HAUSER 105

September 13: Sarah Moss (University of Michigan)

September 27: Lily Hu (Yale University)

October 11: Scott Hershovitz (University of Michigan School of Law)

October 25: Susanna Siegel (Harvard University)

November 8: Emily Kidd White (York University, Osgoode Hall Law School)

November 15: Bill Watson (Harvard Law School)

November 29: Brian Leiter (University of Chicago Law School)

Papers will be circulated about one week ahead of time. Please contact Maureen Worth to request the paper for a particular meeting, or to join the mailing list for the workshop.

This workshop explores the foundations of private law — property, contracts, torts, and restitution. Emphasis will be on theories that offer explanations, justifications, and criticisms of architectural features of these areas of law and of their connections to one another. Sessions will be devoted to paper presentations by outside speakers and to discussions of classic and contemporary works reflecting philosophical, historical, and economic approaches to private law topics.

Fall 2023: Professor Henry Smith & Professor Maureen “Molly” Brady
WEDNESDAYS, 1:30-3:30PM, Hauser 105

September 13, 2023    Carol Rose (Yale Law School), Property Law (Handbook of New Institutional Economics)

September 27, 2023    John Goldberg (Harvard Law School), On Being a Nuisance

October 11, 2023        Kevin Tobia (Georgetown Law School), What is Reasonable? A Multi-Country Study

October 18, 2023        Mala Chatterjee (Columbia Law School), Extending the Legal Person

October 25, 2023        Courtney Cox (Fordham University School of Law), Super-Dicta

November 8, 2023      Keith Hylton (Boston University School of Law), The Slavery Contract and Unconscionability

November 15, 2023    James Stern (William and Mary Law School), Hohfeld and the Third Man

Papers will be available approximately 7-10 days before each presentation.  For any questions or request for papers, please contact Bradford Conner.

This seminar involves the presentation by speakers of papers in the fields of law and economics, law and finance, and contract theory.

Fall 2023 – Professors Louis Kaplow, Lucian Bebchuk, Oliver Hart, and Kathryn Spier
MONDAYS, 12:45-2:15 PM, HAUSER 105

Sept. 11:          Jonathan Zytnick (Georgetown Law School), Do Mutual Funds Represent Individual Investors?

Sept. 18:          Lucian Bebchuk (HLS), Stakeholder Capitalism

Oct. 2:             Alma Cohen (HLS), The Pervasive Role of Ideology in Circuit Court Decisions

Oct. 10:           Raymond Fisman (Boston University), Investing in Influence: Investors, Portfolio Firms, and Political Giving [Please note that this is a TUESDAY]

Oct. 16:           Josh Lerner (HBS), Global Powers and the Global Landscape of Entrepreneurship

Oct. 30:            Vyacheslav Fos (Boston College), Trading Ahead of Barbarians’ Arrival at the Gate: Insider Trading on Non-Inside Information.

Nov. 6:            Lauren Cohen (HBS), TBA

Nov. 20:          Charles Wang (HBS), Governance Transparency and Firm Value: Evidence from Korean Chaebols

The course website is available at: https://canvas.harvard.edu/courses/130484. Select “Syllabus” for papers and the course schedule, or contact Molly Eskridge, (617) 495-4635.

The Health Law, Policy, Bioethics, and Biotechnology Workshop provides a forum for discussion of new scholarship in these fields from the world’s leading experts. You can visit the Petrie-Flom Center for Upcoming Health Law Workshops. For information about the workshops you can contact David LeBreton.

This seminar provides students with an opportunity to engage with ongoing research in the economic analysis of law.

Spring 2024 — Professor Louis Kaplow & Professor Steven Shavell
TUESDAYS,4:00-5:30 PM, Hauser 102

Jan. 23:            [Students only]

Jan. 30:            Daniel Hemel (NYU), Capital Taxation in the Middle of History

Feb. 6:             Mark Roe (Harvard), Bankruptcy and the Rise of Market Valuation

Feb. 13:           Keith Hylton (Boston University), Utility, Copyright, and Fair Use after Warhol

Feb. 20:           Daniel Francis (NYU), Antitrust Without Competition

Feb. 27:           Aileen Nielson (Harvard), Too Accurate AI

Mar. 5:            Molly Brady (Harvard), Hidden Information in Property Law

[Mar. 12:         No Classes – Spring Break]

Mar. 19:          [Students only]

Mar. 26:          Allen Ferrell (Harvard),  Cryptocurrencies and Market Efficiency

Apr. 2:             Florencia Marotta-Wurgler (NYU), Machines That Think like Lawyers: Issues, Methods, and Illustrations from Privacy Policies

Apr. 9:             Jared Ellias (Harvard), The Debt Markets Go Dark

Apr. 16:           Howell Jackson (Harvard), Re-imagining the Financial Stability Oversight Council

Also, two evening sessions for the students will be held in Pound 100 on Thursday, February 22 and Thursday, March 28 from 6:00 p.m. – 9:00 p.m.

The course website is available at:

https://canvas.harvard.edu/courses/134661

Select “Syllabus” for papers and the course schedule,  or contact Molly Eskridge (meskridge@law.harvard.edu)

This workshop is devoted to reading and discussing new scholarly work on law and political economy. Outside speakers and members of the Harvard faculty will present forthcoming papers or recent work, both theoretical and programmatic, on the role of law in structuring social relations, power, and justice in market society. It is not designed to offer a systematic overview of the field of law and political economy, although there will be two sessions for students only when we will discuss the field as a whole, as it is reflected in the papers presented during this semester.

Spring 2024 — Professor Yochai Benkler
MONDAYS, 3:45-5:45 PM, Hauser 104

January 29. Saule Omarova, Cornell Law School. Public Banking as an Institutional Design Project

February 12. Madison Condon, Boston University, Scenarios (on the possible role of scenario analysis as a locus for planning for decarbonization of the economy).

March 4: Maggie Blackhawk, NYU, chapters from a book in progress developed from The Constitution of American Colonialism.

March 18: William Boyd, UCLA, De-commodifying electricity

March 25: Ahmed White, University of Colorado, chapters from book in progress: Sedition and the Hand of Fraternity: Radical Unions, the Forgotten Red Scare, and the Making of the Modern Labor Movement.

April 8: Fellows presentations.
Chika Okafor, HLS LPE Fellow, Seeing Through Colorblindness: Social Networks as a Mechanism for Discrimination and Brian Highsmith, HLS LPE Fellow, Regulating Location Incentives

April 15: Ashraf Ahmed, Columbia Law School, The Rule of Law and the Closing of the Democratic Mind. 

This workshop is devoted to learning about, discussing, and critically evaluating new scholarly work on law and politics. A series of outside speakers, drawn from both law schools and political science departments, will present recent or forthcoming papers on election law and/or American politics.

Spring 2024 — Professor Nicholas Stephanopoulos
TUESDAYS, 3:45-5:45 PM, WCC 3016

Jan. 30: Eitan Hersh (Tufts Political Science)

Feb. 13: Michael Morse (Penn Law)

Feb. 29: Alexander Hertel-Fernandez (Columbia Political Science)

Mar. 19: Justin de Benedictis-Kessner (Harvard Kennedy School)

Apr. 2: Tonja Jacobi (Emory Law)

Apr. 16: Emily Zhang (Berkeley Law)

For faculty or non-registered students who want to attend, please contact Kathy McGillicuddy.

This workshop examines major works in the field of legal history, important historiographical debates and critical methodologies. Students will participate in workshop presentations by leading scholars.

Spring 2024 — Professor Anna Lvovsky & Bruce Mann
MONDAYS, 1:30-3:30 PM, WCC 5044

February 5, 2024 Spencer Weinrich, Junior Fellow, Harvard Society of Fellows
Presentation: “A Medieval Inquisitor Invents Solitary Confinement”

February 12, 2024 Rabia Belt, Professor of Law, Stanford Law School
“The Hidden History of the American M’Naughten”

February 19, 2024 Thomas Frampton, Associate Professor of Law, University of Virginia School of Law
Presentation: “The First Black Jurors and the Integration of the American Jury”

March 18, 2024 Randall L. Kennedy, Professor of Law, Harvard Law School
Presentation: “Policing, Race, and the Second Reconstruction”

April 1, 2024 David W. Garland, New York University School of Law
Presentation: “Penal Leviathan: Structural Sources of America’s Penal State”

April 5, 2024 Elizabeth K. Hinton, Professor of History, African American Studies, and Law, Yale University
Presentation: “Criminal Injustice: Crack Cocaine Laws and Their Legacies”

Papers will be distributed roughly one week before each session. For additional information, please contact Susan Smith, 617-496-2028.

The Public Law Workshop reads contemporary work, in legal theory and adjacent disciplines, on the legal and political foundations of constitutional law, interpretive practice, and regulatory design. Invited speakers present papers each week on topics relevant to the workshop’s themes. Students are required to prepare written questions for each workshop as well as a response paper on a presented work of their choosing.

Spring 2024 — Dean John Manning & Professor Daphna Renan
MONDAYS, 3:45-5:45 PM

Faculty are welcome to join the sessions listed below.

January 22        Aziz Rana (Boston College)
January 29        Saikrishna Prakash (University of Virginia)
February 5        Mila Sohoni (University of San Diego)
February 12      Rachel Rothschild (University of Michigan)
February 19      Stephen Sachs and Josh Kleinfeld (Harvard, Northwestern)
February 26     Jill Lepore (Harvard)
March 4             Ben Eidelson (Harvard)
March 18           Maggie Blackhawk (New York University)
March 25           Ryan Doerfler and Samuel Moyn (Harvard, Yale)
April 1                 Kerrel Murray (Columbia)
April 8                Bridget Fahey (University of Chicago)

Papers will be distributed roughly one week prior to each session. For more information, please contact Ellie Benagh at ebenagh@law.harvard.edu

This seminar involves the presentation by speakers of papers in the fields of law and economics, law and finance, and contract theory.

Spring 2024 – Professors Louis Kaplow, Lucian Bebchuk, Oliver Hart, and Kathryn Spier
MONDAYS, 12:45-2:15 PM, HAUSER 105

Jan. 22:            Nadya Malenko (Boston College), Creating Controversy in Proxy Voting Advice

Jan. 29:            Shikhar Singla (Stanford), Regulatory Costs and Market Power

Feb. 12:           Benjamin Pyle (Boston University), Estimating the Impact of the Age of Criminal Majority: Decomposing Multiple Treatments in a Regression Discontinuity Framework

Mar. 4:            Mark Roe (Harvard), Absolute Priority, Relative Priority, and Valuation Uncertainty in Bankruptcy

[Mar. 11:         No Classes – Spring Break]

Mar. 18:          Emma Harrington (Virginia) and Hannah Shaffer (Harvard), How Individual Bias Becomes Systemic Discrimination: Prosecutors’ Imperfect Check on Police Arrests

Apr. 1:             Ashesh Rambachan (MIT), An Economic Approach to Regulating Algorithms

Apr. 8:             Caroline Flammer (Columbia), Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

Apr. 15:           Kyle Rozema (Northwestern), How Do Occupational Licensing Requirements Affect the Size of the U.S. Legal Profession?

^*For additional information, please visit the course website at:

https://canvas.harvard.edu/courses/130484

 Select “Syllabus” for papers and the course schedule,  or contact Molly Eskridge (meskridge@law.harvard.edu, 617-495-4635)