Latest from Elaine McArdle

Legal education is in a period of profound and much-needed change. That was the unanimous assessment of a group of experts at FutureEd2, a major conference at Harvard Law School that attracted more than 150 legal educators, practitioners, businesspeople and students from around the world.

More than 100 law students, lawyers, and community activists from around the country gathered at Harvard Law School November 15-16 to learn about Project No One Leaves, the HLS student initiative that has had remarkable success in keeping Boston neighborhoods intact despite the foreclosure crisis.

From filing an emergency guardianship petition in probate court ensuring that the children of a dying mother are raised by the person she chooses, to appealing the denial of a disability claim in federal court for a critically ill client, the Harvard Law School Health Law and Policy Clinic prides itself on taking the toughest cases and working to shape policy to protect some of society’s most vulnerable people.

Founded five years ago as a think tank to respond to the need for leading legal scholarship at the intersection of medicine, science, and law, the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School tackles a wide range of issues, bringing together top scholars from a variety of fields in an interdisciplinary approach to some of the thorniest problems faced by society today.

Sports agent Ronald M. Shapiro ’67 has a dream roster of clients that includes more baseball Hall of Famers than any other agent, including Cal Ripken Jr., Brooks Robinson, Eddie Murray, Kirby Puckett, and such future Hall of Fame probables as 2009 American League MVP Joey Mauer, for whom Shapiro recently negotiated a $184 million contract with the Minnesota Twins.

Harvard Law School's Problem Solving Workshop gives every 1L an early look at what lawyers really do

The canvassing effort, dubbed Project No One Leaves, was launched in 2008 by two HLAB students, Nick Hartigan ’09 and David Haller ’09, along with WilmerHale Legal Services Center clinical student Tony Borich ’09.

To prevent domestic violence, do we now overregulate the home? A scholar raises some provocative questions.

Far more is at risk in the health care reform debates than the well-being of the 47 million Americans who are currently uninsured, according to Jeff Crowley, the White House director of the Office of National AIDS Policy and senior adviser on Disability Policy, who spoke to an engaged crowd of about 60 students and others at HLS Wednesday night.

On June 3, as her classmates celebrated Class Day and prepared for graduation ceremonies, Kristina Matic ’09 stood in Roxbury District Court cross-examining a police officer who claimed her client had driven recklessly on his motorcycle and resisted arrest.

When Ariel Rothstein ’10 and Andrew Freedman ’10 spotted the whirling blue lights of a patrol car behind them as they drove through rural Texas in January, they assumed they had been driving too fast.

What if the government forced all citizens to get genetic testing to find out if they were carriers of a deadly disease such as Tay-Sachs? “Any constitutional problem with that?” I. Glenn Cohen ’03 asks the 25 students in his popular course, Genetics and Reproductive Technology: Legal and Ethical Issues, as he paces before the blackboard in a Hauser classroom.

For students looking for cutting-edge legal work in the realm of new technologies, there may be no better place than the Cyberlaw Clinic at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society. In the fall of 2008, more than 40 students were involved in a wide range of projects that explored areas such as free speech, intellectual property and online child safety in the context of the Internet and other rapidly developing technologies. Many of the projects the center undertook involves issues being litigated for the first time.

If leaders had listened to Elizabeth Warren years ago, she wouldn't have the job she has now.

Last fall, budding real estate lawyer Lauren Smith ’09 enrolled in the transactional practice unit at Harvard Law School’s WilmerHale Legal Services Center with the aim of adding practical experience to her legal education. It proved to be an invaluable decision.

For 35 years, Washington, D.C. attorney Robert B. Barnett has been one of the nation’s most sought-after lawyers, representing major corporations including McDonald’s, General Electric, and Comcast.

When Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg ’56-’58 was a student at HLS in the 1950s, she was one of nine women in a class of more than 500, and women weren’t allowed to live in the dorms. Still, “I found the professors endlessly stimulating and the discussion with my colleagues equally so,” she recalled as the featured speaker at “Gender and the Law: Unintended Consequences, Unsettled Questions,” a conference at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study co-sponsored by HLS.

A day-long symposium on the current status of immigration law drew immigration lawyers, policymakers and other experts from around the country to discuss a wide range of issues, from undocumented aliens to under-resourced courts and controversial enforcement methods.

For those who work in the field of human rights during times of war, Afghanistan is the front line. For the past year, Erica Gaston ’07 has lived in Kabul as a Henigson Human Rights Fellow, assisting victims of the war and studying the conflict.

Four HLS students in the Negotiation and Mediation Clinical Program have just finished an ambitious, semester-long project with Kenneth R. Feinberg, Special Master of the 9/11 Fund and a leading expert in alternative dispute resolution, to help staunch the widespread mortgage foreclosure crisis by bringing banks and homeowners together to refashion mortgage agreements.

Six HLS students in the Title IX clinical course of Diane L. Rosenfeld spent two days recently at the University of Richmond conducting a training session for more than 50 undergraduate student leaders on issues of sexual respect, rape, consent, and related matters.