Workshops and Seminars for Students and Faculty

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. Harvard graduate students may register to take the workshop for course credit, but it is also open to the public. Upcoming Health Law Workshops

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

Fall 2022 — Professor Louis Kaplow & Professor Steven Shavell
TUESDAYS,4:00-5:30 PM, WCC 3007

September 6    Oren Bar-Gill*, Cass Sunstein* (both of Harvard Law School) & Inbal Talgam-Cohen (Technion), Algorithmic Harm in Consumer Markets

September 13  Ryan Bubb, Emiliano Catan (both of NYU School of Law) & Holger Spamann* (Harvard Law School), A Functional Analysis of Shareholder Rights in Mergers

September 20  Jennifer Arlen* & Lewis Kornhauser (both of New York University School of Law), Battle for Our Souls: A Psychological Justification for Corporate and Individual Liability for Organizational Misconduct

September 27  Murat Mungan* (George Mason University), Erkmen Aslim (Grand Valley State University) & Yijia Lu (George Mason University), Inmate Assistance Programs: Toward a Less Punitive and More Effective Criminal Justice System

October 4        Steven Shavell (Harvard Law School), The Fundamental Divergence Between the Private and the Social Motive to Use the Legal System

October 11      No class—Monday schedule

October 18      Zohar Goshen* (Columbia Law School) & Reilly Steel (Princeton University), Raiders, Activists, and the Risk of Mistargeting

October 25      Merritt Fox & Joshua Mitts* (both of Columbia Law School), Event-Driven Suits and the Rethinking of Securities Litigation

November 1    Meirav Furth (UCLA School of Law; Tel-Aviv University School of Law), Retail Race Discrimination

November 8  Michael Love (University of California, Berkeley), Tax Arbitrage Through Partnership Flexibility

November 15  Gary D. Libecap (University of California, Santa Barbara), Federal Lands, Opportunity Costs, and Bureaucratic Management 

November 22 STUDENT-ONLY SESSION Louis Kaplow (Harvard Law School), Likelihood Ratio Tests and Legal Decision Rules

November 29  Victoria Angelova (Harvard University), Will Dobbie (Harvard Kennedy Sschool) & Crystal Yang* (Harvard Law School), Algorithmic Recommendations and Human Discretion

Two evening students-only sessions will be held from 6-9 PM, on Thursday, October 13, and Thursday, November 17 (both in Hauser Hall 102).

*Presenting

The course website is available at: https://canvas.harvard.edu/courses/108904.  Select “Syllabus” for papers and the course schedule,  or contact Irina Goldina.

This workshop examines new ideas at the intersection of law and philosophy. Half of the workshop meetings will be devoted to discussion of pre-circulated working papers presented by invited authors. These sessions are open to the Harvard community. The other meetings, limited to enrolled students, will be devoted to discussion of other significant works in the field.

Fall 2022: Professor Benjamin Eidelson & Professor Christopher Lewis
WEDNESDAYS, 3:45-5:45 PM, HAUSER 105

September 14: Stephen Sachs (Harvard Law School)

September 28: Deborah Hellman HLS Visiting Professor fall 2022 (University of Virginia School of Law)

October 12: Mala Chatterjee (Columbia Law School)

October 26: Kimberly Kessler Ferzan (University of Pennsylvania School of Law)

November 9: Erik Encarnacion (University of Texas at Austin School of Law)

November 30: Mitchell Berman (University of Pennsylvania School of Law)

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

Fall 2022 — Professor Anna Lvovsky
MONDAYS, 3:45-5:45 PM, WCC 3007

(Sept. 19): Tera Eva Agyepong, DePaul College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences, “Constructing a Black Female Delinquent: Race, Gender, and the Criminalization of African American Girls at the Illinois Training School for Girls at Geneva”

(Sept. 26): Kate R. Redburn, Columbia Law School, “Before Equal Protection: The Fall of Anti-Crossdressing Law and the Origins of the Transgender Legal Movement 1964-1980”

(Oct. 3): Reva Siegel, Yale Law School, “Memory Games: Dobbs’s Originalism As Anti-Democratic Living Constitutionalism — and Some Pathways for Resistance”

(Oct. 11): Aya Gruber, University of Colorado Law School, “Sex Exceptionalism in Criminal Law”

(Oct. 21): Mary Ziegler, UC Davis School of Law, On History and the Future of Abortion Rights after Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization 

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

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

Fall 2022 – Professors Louis Kaplow, Lucian Bebchuk, Oliver Hart, and Kathryn Spier
MONDAYS, 12:45-2:15 PM, HAUSER 105

Sept. 12:          Vyacheslav Fos (BC Carroll School of Management), The Political Polarization of Corporate America (with E. Kempf and M. Tsoutsoura)

Sept. 19:          Jared Ellias (HLS), Employee Bankruptcy Trauma

Oct. 3:             Raj Chetty, (Harvard), Improving Equality of Opportunity in America: New Insights from Big Data

Oct. 11:           Haggai Porat (HLS), Behavior-Based Price Discrimination and Consumer Protection in the Age of Algorithms [Please note that this is a TUESDAY.]

Oct. 24:           Alma Cohen (HLS), Judging Under Public Pressure (with Z. Neeman and F.  Auferoth)

Oct. 31:           Alon Brav (Duke Fuqua School of Business), Picking Friends Before Picking (Proxy) Fights: How Mutual Fund Voting Shapes Proxy Contests (with W. Jiang, T. Li, and J. Pinnington)

Nov. 7:            Christine Jolls (Yale Law School), The Administrative Procedure Act and the Supreme Court

Nov. 14:          David Thesmar (MIT Sloan) and Luigi Zingales (Chicago Booth), Private Sanctions (with O. Hart)

For additional information, please visit the course website, or contact Molly Eskridge, 617-495-4635.

This workshop involves reading, discussing, and critiquing scholarly works broadly relating to the theme of Global Justice. Among the topics addressed are distributive justice across national boundaries; state responsibility for the international consequences of domestic policy decisions; and comparisons between legal and moral responsibilities among states and among individuals. The focus will be on the doctrinal and theoretical aspects of these questions rather than hands-on practice.

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

Tuesday, January 31st – Christina Davis, Department of Government at Harvard University

Davis, “Shining Light on Regulatory Policies: WTO Disputes and Transparency for Health and Safety Rules” 

Tuesday, February 7th – Naz Modirzadeh, Harvard Law School

Modirzadeh, “‘Let Us All Agree to Die a Little:’ TWAIL’s Unfulfilled Promise” 

Tuesday, February 14th – Gary Bass, Princeton Politics

Bass, “Judgment at Tokyo: WWII on Trial and the Making of Modern Asia” 

Tuesday, February 21st – Peter Dietsch, University of Victoria (Philosophy)

Dietsch, “The Global (In)justice of Taxing Multinationals”

Tuesday, February 28th – Anne Orford, Harvard Law School Visiting Professor of Law

Orford, “How to Think about the Battle for the State at the WTO”

Tuesday, March 7th – Leif Wenar, Stanford University (Philosophy)

Wenar, “Fighting the Resource Curse”

Tuesday, March 21st – Monica Hakimi, Columbia Law School

Hakimi, “Conflict: How International Law Works”

Tuesday, March 28th – Uchenna Okeja, Rhodes University (Philosophy)

Okeja, “Should Countries Choose their Preferred Immigrants?”

Tuesday, April 4th – Kelebogile Zvobogo, William & Mary (Government)

Zvobogo, “Violence and Public Attitudes Toward Punishment” 

Tuesday, April 11th – Neha Jain, University of Minnesota Law School

Jain, “Refugee Markets”

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 Global Justice Workshop Canvas page here for further information.

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. Harvard graduate students may register to take the workshop for course credit, but it is also open to the public. Upcoming Health Law Workshops

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

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

January 24       Mark Roe* (Harvard Law School) & Charles Wang (Harvard Business School), Are Public Firms Disappearing? Corporate Law and Market Power Analyses

January 31       Yonathan Arbel* (University of Alabama School of Law) & Michael Gilbert (University of Virginia School of Law), Truth Bounties: A Market Solution to Fake News

February 7       Xinyu Hua (Hong Kong University of Science & Technology) & Kathryn Spier* (Harvard Law School), Holding Platforms Liable

February 14     Steven Shavell (Harvard Law School), An Alternative to the Basic Causal Requirement for Liability Under the Negligence Rule

February 21     Keith Hylton (Boston University School of Law), Waivers

February 28     Michael Francus (Climenko Fellow and Lecturer on Law, Harvard Law School), Designing Designer Bankruptcy

March 7           STUDENT-ONLY SESSION Louis Kaplow (Harvard Law School), Horizontal Merger Analysis

March 14         No class—Spring Break

March 21        Lucian Bebchuk* (Harvard Law School), Kobi Kastiel (Tel Aviv University Faculty of Law; Senior Research Fellow and Lecturer on Law, Harvard Law School) & Anna Toniolo (Postdoctoral Fellow, Program on Corporate Governance, Harvard Law School), How Twitter Pushed Stakeholders under the Bus

March 28         Jared Ellias (Harvard Law School), Employee Bankruptcy Trauma

April 4             Zehua Li, Julian Nyarko (both of Stanford Law School) & Sarath Sanga* (Harvard Law School), The Terms of Freedom: Black Labor Contracts in the Reconstruction South

April 11         Caley Petrucci* (Climenko Fellow and Lecturer on Law, Harvard Law School) & Guhan Subramanian* (Harvard Law School; Harvard Business School), ESG Amnesia in M&A Deals: The Case of Musk and Twitter

April 18          John Donohue*, Samuel Cai, Matthew Bondy (all of Stanford Law School) & Philip Cook (Duke University, Sanford School of Public Policy), Why Does Right-to-Carry Cause Violent Crime to Increase?

*Presenting

The course website is available at: https://canvas.harvard.edu/courses/118364.  Select “Syllabus” for papers and the course schedule,  or contact Irina Goldina.

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 2023 — Professor Yochai Benkler
MONDAYS, 3:45-5:45 PM, Hauser Hall 104

January 23. Naz Modirzadeh (Harvard Law School), Paper: ‘[L]et Us All Agree to Die A Little’: TWAIL’s Unfulfilled Promise

January 30. Students only. Overview of LPE and the seminar. No paper.

February 6. Sabeel Rahman (Brooklyn Law School), Structuralist Regulation

February 13. Amna Akbar (Ohio State Mortiz College of the Law), Reform and Struggles over Life, Death, and Democracy

February 20. Abbye Atkinson (Berkeley Law School), Borrowing and Belonging.

February 24 Kate Andrias (Columbia Law School), Constitutional Clash: Labor, Capital, and Democracy. Please note location and time change for this class session. It will be held in Hauser Hall 102 from 1:30pm to 3:30pm.

February 27 William Novak (Michigan Law School), chapters from New Democracy: The Creation of the Modern American State.

March 6 Salome Viljoen (Michigan Law School), Prices, Data and Politics in the Market Machine.

March 20 No meeting.

March 27 Aziz Rana (Cornell Law School), The Constitutional Bind: Why a Broken Document Rules America (chapters)

April 3. Ntina Tzouvala (Australian National University College of the Law), The ‘unwilling or unable’ doctrine and the political economy of the war on terror

April 10 Lev Menand (Columbia Law School), Banks as Public Utilities and Banking Law as Monetary System Design

April 17 Karen Levy (Department of Sociology, Cornell University), Chapters from Data Driven: Truckers, Technology, and the New Workplace Surveillance.

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.

 — Professor Nicholas Stephanopoulos

No workshop held in 2022-23

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

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.

Spring 2023: Professor John Goldberg & Professor Henry Smith
WEDNESDAYS, 1:30-3:30PM, WCC 3016

February 1, 2023  Danielle D’Onfro (Washington University in St. Louis School of Law), Contract-Wrapped Property

February 15, 2023  Erin Kelly (Harvard Law School), Restorative Justice in Criminal and Private Law

March 1, 2023   David Blankfein-Tabachnik (Michigan State University College of Law), Taxing the Tort Crime Divide

March 8, 2023   Cristina Tilley (University of Iowa College of Law),  A New Private Law of Policing

March 29, 2023  Avihay Dorfman (Tel Aviv University, Buchmann Faculty of Law), Conflict between Equals: A Vindication of Tort Law

April 5, 2023   Eleanor Brown (Fordham University School of Law), Preface/Introduction, “The Afro Saxons and Their Property”, The Nature of the Farm: Explaining Different Methods of Feeding Enslaved People in the Antebellum South and British West Indies

April 19, 2023   Jed Lewinsohn (Harvard Law School), TBA

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

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 2023 — Dean John Manning & Professor Martha Minow
MONDAYS, 3:45-5:45 PM, WCC 3007

Faculty are welcome to join the sessions listed below.

January 30: Emma Kaufman

February 6: Jud Campbell

February 13: David Fontana

February 20: Maggie Blackhawk

February 27: Tara Grove

March 6: Maya Sen

March 20: Madhav Khosla

March 27: Anita Krishnakumar

April 3: Issa Kohler-Hausmann

April 10: Jessica Clarke

April 17: Guy-Uriel Charles

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