Latest from Emily Newburger

Victor Madrigal-Borloz, the UN Independent Expert on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity shared his views at a virtual event last month hosted by the HLS Human Rights Program that focused on his year-long investigation into incorporation of gender and gender identity into international human rights law.

Harvard Law student Michael Chang-Frieden ’23 discusses writing a global watchdog report on Japan’s ability to fight money laundering, terrorist financing, and nuclear proliferation financing.

Alexander Chen ’15, founding director of the LGBTQ+ Advocacy Clinic at Harvard Law School, on the significance of the Biden administration's executive orders providing protections for LGBTQ people, the danger of backlash, and the work that still needs to be done.

Harvard Law Visiting Professor Sanford Levinson puts the storming of the Capitol in historical perspective.

During a global pandemic when classes are remote and students are living around the country and the world, there is no such thing as business as usual. But this year’s class marshals are determined to do their part.

Lee Mestre helped to coordinate Harvard Law School student aid efforts after natural disasters in New Orleans and Puerto Rico. Now she's using that experience to help law students support people in Massachusetts affected by the COVID-19 crisis.

Lila Fenwick ’56 was a student at Harvard Law School in 1954 when the Supreme Court decision in Brown v.  Board of Education came down. “I was delirious,” recalled Fenwick, one of only a handful of women students at HLS at the time and the only black woman among them.

Harvard Law School Professor Emily Broad Leib ’08, director of the HLS Food Law and Policy Clinic, and her students have been working furiously to ensure that the most vulnerable—and ultimately the rest of us—are fed during the COVID-19 pandemic.

In a lively and provocative talk at Harvard Law School, Lawrence Lessig, the Roy L. Furman Professor of Law and Leadership, delved into his theory of constitutional law, which he explores in his most recent book "Fidelity and Constraint: How the Supreme Court has Read the American Constitution."

In her Class Day address to the Harvard Law School Class of 2019, Roberta “Robbie” Kaplan drew on experience from her own 25-year career and encouraged students to seek opportunities to make the world a better place.

Celebrating a legal services experiment run by Harvard Law School more than 50 years ago—at a time when clinical education did not exist at the school and change was in the air.

John Manning ’85 on getting advice, giving it and “doing disagreement right.”

On a clear, windy afternoon in early September at the opening of its bicentennial observance, Harvard Law School unveiled a memorial on campus.

Martha Minow became HLS’s 12th dean in 2009, after teaching at HLS since 1981. In January, she announced her intention to step down at the end of the academic year. This spring Minow spoke with the Bulletin about the institution she loves, the future of legal education and what she looks forward to next.

This fall, Harvard Law School held a conference in celebration of the career of legal historian and HLS Professor Charles Donahue. Scholars came from around the country and around the world and spoke on topics related to medieval and early modern history.

Terry Franklin ’89, a trusts and estates litigator, knows the importance of wills to those left behind. Recently he has focused on a will executed 170 years ago with enormous bearing on his ancestors’ survival and his own existence.

James Alan McPherson ’68 grew up in poverty in segregated Georgia, and went on to write short fiction and essays that deftly explore race, class and community and what it means to be human. He was the first black author to receive the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

Jocelyn Kennedy, former director for library services at the University of Connecticut School of Law, is the new executive director of the Harvard Law School Library.

John P. Carlin ’99, assistant attorney general for National Security, spoke last week at Harvard Law School on the National Security Cyber Threat, at an event hosted by the Harvard National Security Journal.

“Seattle Justice: The Rise and Fall of the Police Payoff System in Seattle,” by Christopher T. Bayley ’66 (Sasquatch Books). In the early 1970s, as the…

In late May, four Harvard Law faculty members, Charles Fried, Michael Gregory, Kathryn Spier and David Wilkins, each shared a snapshot of innovative research with the HLS community, followed by discussion as part of the 2015 Harvard Law School Thinks Big lecture.

When you next have a free moment online, visit the Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. Digital Suite, launched by the Harvard Law School Library early…

Justice Clarence Thomas has become known as a quiet presence on the Supreme Court. But on Jan. 29, members of the Harvard Law School community got to hear him speak—and he did so with great humor and warmth. As part of the Herbert W. Vaughan Lecture Series, Thomas participated in a conversation with HLS Dean Martha Minow, after a day in which he met with faculty and students.

Democrat Joseph P. Kennedy III ’09 has been elected to fill the Massachusetts congressional seat left vacant by the retirement of U.S. Representative Barney Frank ’77.

HLS Professor Bill Stuntz completed “The Collapse of American Criminal Justice” just a few month before his death from cancer at age 52. The book has been hailed as a masterwork and Stuntz called the leading thinker on criminal justice. His longtime friend HLS Professor Carol Steiker helped to shepherd the completed manuscript through its final stages of production. “It felt like a continued conversation with Bill.” says Steiker.

Daniel Doktori ’13 knew he wanted to work in the venture capital field during his first summer in law school. After reaching out to Israeli venture capitalist Yadin Kaufmann ’84, he spent the summer in Israel and the West Bank working on the first fund aimed at investing exclusively in Palestinian high-tech startups.

Michael Klarman’s scholarship has focused on the effect that court rulings have on social reform movements. He argues that when courts get ahead of public opinion, political backlash often follows. That’s what he found in an earlier book he wrote on race and the U.S. Supreme Court, and it is a phenomenon he has also observed in cases involving the death penalty and abortion. In his new book, “From the Closet to the Altar: Courts, Backlash, and the Struggle for Same-Sex Marriage,” the HLS professor explores whether the same effect has taken place when it comes to same-sex marriage litigation.

Rarely has a presidential race been so hard to call, said David Gergen ’67, during a talk on Oct. 26 at Harvard Law School Fall Reunions. A former adviser to four presidents, a regular contributor to CNN and a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School, Gergen put the race between fellow HLS graduates Mitt Romney ’75 and President Barack Obama ’91 in historical perspective, analyzed its development, talked about its import—and made some predictions.

Michael Klarman’s scholarship has focused on the effect that court rulings have on social reform movements. He argues that when courts get ahead of public opinion, political backlash often follows. That’s what he found in an earlier book he wrote on race and the U.S. Supreme Court, and it is a phenomenon he has also observed in cases involving the death penalty and abortion.mIn his new book, “From the Closet to the Altar: Courts, Backlash, and the Struggle for Same-Sex Marriage” (Oxford), the HLS professor explores whether the same effect has taken place when it comes to same-sex marriage litigation.

Harvard Law School Professor D. James Greiner is co-author of a recent study on the experience of Boston voters in the election of 2008. As another election approaches, we ask Greiner a few questions about his study and the current efforts to pass tougher voter ID laws.

By her 2L year, Regina Fitzpatrick ’08 was dead set on working for the U.N. on a peacekeeping mission. She’d come to HLS with a master’s in human rights after a stint with the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. The U.N.’s “legitimacy and access to hot spots,” she says, made it her goal. She is now working in Juba, South Sudan, living her dream.

In 1932, in a Philadelphia courtroom, a defense attorney representing a man accused of murder cross-examined a police officer. There was nothing unusual about this scene, except that the defense attorney, Raymond Pace Alexander ’23, was black, and the officer he was aggressively questioning was white. This scene is one of many dramatic moments in the new book by HLS Professor Kenneth Mack ’91, “Representing the Race: The Creation of the Civil Rights Lawyer.”

HLS Professor William Alford ’77, a member of the executive committee of the board of directors of Special Olympics International and chair of its research and policy committee, met with U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in November to discuss disability issues. Alford was a participant in the meeting at the invitation of Timothy Shriver, chairman of Special Olympics, and Na Kyung-won, a member of the South Korean Congress who has been at the forefront of disability rights legislation.

Thirty years ago, Laurent Cohen-Tanugi embraced internationalism by leaving France to attend HLS. Today, as a leading international lawyer and public intellectual, he is an architect of a European strategy for globalization.

Rebecca Hamilton ’07 has traveled extensively in Sudan, interviewing powerful generals in the north and refugees in Darfur who had survived murderous government raids. But that was easy, she says, compared to the delicate task of talking about the book that resulted. “Fighting for Darfur: Public Action and the Struggle to Stop Genocide” is a look at the advocacy movement that Hamilton was part of and which she has now come to critique.

A few weeks before he received his LL.M. from Harvard Law last year, János Fiala was handed a victory by the European Court of Human Rights.

This fall, Professor John Goldberg, a tort law specialist at Harvard Law School, unexpectedly found himself engaged in a research project that could impact the lives of thousands of Americans. And it needed to be completed in a matter of weeks.

Since the financial crisis hit, HLS Professor Hal Scott and the Committee on Capital Markets Regulation, an independent research organization which he directs, have been working double time making recommendations on financial regulatory reform through white papers, major reports and testimony before Congress.

In a Jan. 27 talk titled “Line of Fire: On Being a 'Fortune 10' General Counsel," sponsored by the HLS Program on the Legal Profession, Stephen F. Gates ’72 (M.B.A. ’72) addressed the role and responsibilities of in-house counsel in today’s changing world of legal practice, and he spoke candidly about some of the specific situations he has faced in the “line of fire.”

HLS Visiting Professor Timothy Wu ’92 spoke at Harvard Law School on Jan. 11 about his new book, “The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires.” Wu is a professor at Columbia Law School.

Professor Gráinne de Búrca calls EU law “history in the making, a process of integration that’s taking place and changing before our eyes.” When she first taught the subject in Europe—at Oxford and then the European University Institute in Florence, Italy—it was a question of interpreting the region’s emergent law.

Beginning in 2013, Harvard Law School’s new Public Service Venture Fund will provide $1 million per year in grants to support new and recent graduates who will be working for public service employers, and also to support those who want to start their own organizations. With this commitment, the School is enhancing its focus on entrepreneurship in general and social entrepreneurship specifically—to encourage current students to pursue their own ideas and to prepare students who might want to apply for support from the fund and other sources of assistance for public service enterprises.

In Christian Legal Society v. Martinez, the Supreme Court ruled 5-to-4 last June that a public law school did not violate the First Amendment by withdrawing recognition from a Christian student group that excluded gay students. On Sept. 8, the Harvard Federalist Society sponsored a discussion of Martinez and its implications for religious freedom.