Latest from Elaine McArdle

n the spirit of Harvard University President Drew Faust’s recent focus on addressing the problem of climate change, we interviewed HLS Professor Jody Freeman, who served in the Obama administration as Counselor for Energy and Climate Change and is the co-author of a forthcoming book on global climate change and U.S. law.

Harvard Law School has announced that Bertram Fields, one of the nation’s most renowned entertainment lawyers, has made a gift of $5 million to Harvard Law School to endow the Bertram Fields Professorship of Law. Fields, a native of Los Angeles, California, received his law degree from Harvard Law School, magna cum laude, in 1952.

Students and recent graduates share their experiences with the Environmental Law and Policy Program at Harvard Law and discuss the influence that participation in the range of offerings has had on their academic and professional careers in Environmental Law.

Having completed its first phase of growth, the Harvard Law School Environmental Law and Policy Program is now looking to strengthen and build. “We’ve gone from zero to 100 in a very short period of time,” says HLS Professor Jody Freeman, program founder and director. “And I feel as if we are just getting started.”

How best to assist people in financial trouble is the focus of the Consumer Financial Distress Project, a groundbreaking new study designed and led by Harvard Law School Professor Jim Greiner, Professor Dalié Jiménez at the University of Connecticut School of Law, and Professor Lois Lupica at the University of Maine School of Law.

Tama Matsuoka Wong ’83 was a securities lawyer in Hong Kong when her toddler began to suffer from such severe allergies that she was hospitalized. When it became clear that the problem was related to processed foods, Wong and her family returned to the U.S., where they could have better control over what they ate.

First Lady Michelle Obama ’88 on cultivating a healthier future for children.

With more and more people deeply concerned about what they’re eating and what it means for our health, the economy, the environment, social justice, and even national security, Harvard Law School has created a new focus on food law.

Human trafficking. Cybercrime. Consumer protection. Public integrity. With broad constitutional and statutory jurisdiction, state attorneys general handle all these matters and more, often in high-impact litigation. Given this variety of opportunities it provides, Harvard Law School’s Attorney General Clinic, taught by former Maine AG James E. Tierney, has been one of the most popular in the clinical program since it was instituted in 2011. And now Tierney has expanded enrollment in the clinic by using winter term to send HLS students to work in AGs’ offices across the country.

There are two Navy JAG Corps officers in the HLS LL.M. program this year, both with distinguished legal careers in the military. For the past…

For people living with HIV/AIDS and other chronic health conditions, finding the optimal healthcare plan for their needs is a lot easier, thanks to a new assessment tool created by Clinical Professor Robert Greenwald and others at the Harvard Law School Center for Health Law & Policy Innovation.

Crimmigration—the intersection of criminal law and immigration—is a burgeoning legal area, and one that is of great interest to students, according to Harvard Law School Lecturer on Law and Clinical Instructor Phil Torrey. This fall, Torrey, who supervises the Harvard Immigration Project's Bond Hearing Representation project, will be offering a new clinical course on the topic.

The Board of Veterans’ Appeals of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs denies a soldier’s claim for disability benefits for an injury that occurred while he was on active duty. But the decision is handed down while the soldier is redeployed to Afghanistan, and he doesn’t realize he has the right to appeal until after he returns stateside—after the appeal deadline has passed. For students in HLS’s new Veterans Legal Clinic, the chance to work on this case and others like it is eye-opening.

Many for-profit colleges, which get the overwhelming majority of their revenues from federal financial aid programs, rely on high-pressure tactics and false employment and salary guarantees to lure students into taking out loans. Now, through the efforts of Harvard Law School alum Toby Merrill ’11, some of the victims of these practices can get free legal aid to enforce their rights.

As Americans travel to other countries for medical care, Professor Glenn Cohen looks at the implications at home and abroad.

Nancy-Ann DeParle, director of the White House Office of Health Reform from 2009 to 2011, answers questions about the Affordable Care Act.

With national attention focused on the obesity epidemic and the diabetes crisis—along with rapidly growing concerns about social justice and environmental problems related to the current food-production system—there may be no hotter topic in law schools right now than food law and policy. The wildly popular new Harvard Law School Food Law and Policy Clinic, the first law school clinic of its kind in the world, is right at the center, with students working on a wide range of projects to make healthy food more accessible, help farmers’ markets overcome regulatory barriers so they can sell more of their products, guide states and local communities in creating food policy councils, and more.

Last month, as an historic trial continued in Guatemala against a former dictator charged with the genocide of indigenous Mayans, Lauren Herman ’13—a student in the Harvard Immigration and Refugee Clinic (HIRC) —stood in court in Boston as a judge announced he was granting asylum to her Mayan client, who, with his family, had suffered persecution for decades before he came to the U.S. in 2009.

The Board of Veterans’ Appeals denies a soldier’s claim for disability benefits for an injury to his lower extremities. But the decision is handed down while the soldier is serving in Afghanistan, and he doesn’t realize he has the right to appeal until after he returns from his deployment—after the appeal deadline has passed. For students in Harvard Law School’s new Veterans Legal Clinic, the chance to argue that the appeal deadline should have been tolled and the case allowed to proceed on the merits is proving invaluable educationally and personally.

Nancy Gertner's two decades as a defense attorney in Boston as a self-described “revolutionary” and “radical lawyer” redoubled her belief in the inherent unfairness of many aspects of the criminal justice system, including its disparate impact on racial minorities. As she relates in her new book, it also laid the groundwork for her federal judgeship.