Latest from Elaine McArdle

In his work with Harvard Law School's International Human Rights Clinic and beyond, Paras Shah '19 has always centered his approach to human rights on inclusion.

The British-trained French attorney who chose Harvard Law School for its human rights training plans to continue working on international human rights and international humanitarian law litigation.

As a Satter Human Rights Fellow, Jenny Domino LL.M. ’18 spent her fellowship year focused on how social media policy limits one's right to speak in the midst of democratic transition.

The U.S. is falling behind in fiber optic technology, but cities and localities are leading the way.

Logan Leslie JD/MBA ’19 loved military service and planned to spend his lifetime in it. But a growing family—along with the ‘heartbreaking’ poverty and failed institutions he witnessed in Afghanistan—spurred him to serve in a different way.

HLSA President Dan Eaton ’89 wants to share the benefits of a remarkable experience.

Five new lawyer-scholars at Harvard Law School are already influencing the national conversation on our criminal law system.

As staff attorney with the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia for more than three years, Assistant Professor Andrew Manuel Crespo '08 represented adults and juveniles charged with felonies ranging from armed robberies to homicides. Passionate about the work, he had no plans to become an academic. But early in his career, then-Dean Martha Minow engaged him in a life-changing conversation.

Assistant Professor Crystal Yang ’13, who joined the HLS faculty in 2014, brings an empirical focus to the study of criminal law. Yang, who holds a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard, has in the past focused her empirical studies on criminal sentencing. She has now turned her attention to the extensive use of cash bail and pretrial detention in the U.S., in order to understand their short- and long-term consequences.

"I think criminal procedure is a very fundamental part of the constitutional law of democracy,” says Assistant Professor Daphna Renan, who writes about structural constitutional law, administrative law, and the Fourth Amendment. “When can the government use force against its own citizens? When can it search individuals, communities and communications? How do emergent technologies challenge existing legal frameworks? For anyone who cares about power and how law constrains and enables it, there are no more pressing questions than these.”

There are more than 2 million people imprisoned in the U.S. today. One hundred years from now, historians are likely to be fascinated by this carceral state: How did we get here? Are there better options for society? Some of the answers—or, at least, possible alternatives—may lie in an examination of medieval England. As a Harvard undergrad, Assistant Professor Elizabeth Papp Kamali ’07 fell in love with medieval legal history. After graduating from HLS, she got her Ph.D. in history at the University of Michigan, then joined the HLS faculty in 2015.

Assistant Professor Anna Lvovsky '13, who joined the HLS faculty in 2017, always planned to teach. A legal historian - she holds a Ph.D. from Harvard - with a focus on the administration of criminal justice, she teaches a seminar on the history of policing in the U.S. as well as courses on evidence and criminal law that invite students to focus on the systemic effects of seemingly neutral legal rules.

Eve L. Howe ’21 is an expert in nuclear submarines -- specifically, the fluid systems that cool the nuclear reactors in military submarines. Drawn to military service because she wanted to use her engineering skills for public service, Howe spent five years as an officer in the U.S. Navy, where she solved complex technical problems to ensure the submarines would be able to accomplish their missions.

During his undergraduate studies, Stephen Petraeus wanted to explore a different world from the military life in which grew up. But as a sophomore, Petraeus felt a longing for that world and joined ROTC—a decision that led to eight years in the U.S. Army and two deployments to Afghanistan, including with the storied 173rd Airborne Brigade Combat Team.

With no other members of the military in the extended family, the parents of U.S. Navy Lieutenant Commander Sara Plesser Neugroschel LL.M. ’19 were “very, very surprised” when she decided to commission in the Navy after her 2L year at the University of Miami Law School, from which she graduated in 2009.

Clinical education at HLS: Four experiences

There is no shortage of serious legal issues facing poor people in Greater St. Louis, especially people of color, says Blake Strode ’15, who was born and raised in the area. Just three years out of HLS, Strode is back home fighting the criminalization of poverty as executive director of ArchCity Defenders, a nonprofit civil rights law firm in St. Louis that has filed landmark cases that have already improved the lives of tens of thousands of low-income people.

With Evisort, a powerful new search engine that harnesses cloud storage and artificial intelligence, four HLS students hope to revolutionize the costly and labor-intensive way that lawyers currently handle contracts and other transactional work, liberating them for more creative and interesting tasks.

As a JAG officer in the U.S. Marine Corps for more than six years, Jenna E. Reed LL.M. ’18 prosecuted and defended some of the most serious cases in that branch of the military, focusing on violent and special victims crimes, including shaken-baby cases and others involving children.

In becoming a Marine and then a lawyer, Nathan Garrett Jester ’20 is interested in someday going into local or state politics in his home state of Georgia, to serve the community where he was born and raised.