Latest from Emily Newburger

Looking back and ahead with Dean Martha Minow

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 newly…

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.