Latest from HLS News Staff

This weekend, leaders of the financial systems of the United States and China will gather in Tianjin, China to examine the financial relationship between the two countries. Organized by HLS's Program on International Financial Systems and the China Development Research Foundation, the "Symposium on Building the Financial System of the 21st Century: An Agenda for China and the United States" will allow participants from the U.S. and China to discuss financial challenges facing the two nations.

Professor Richard Fallon is this year's winner of the prestigious Sacks-Freund Teaching Award, an honor bestowed each year by the Harvard Law School graduating class. The award recognizes teaching ability, attentiveness to student concerns and general contributions to student life at the law school.

In its annual meeting this spring, the American Law and Economics Association elected Professor Lucian Bebchuk as its Vice-President/ President-Elect. He will serve as vice-president until the Association's annual meeting next spring when he will assume the Association's presidency for one year.

Anand Swaminathan '06 received the Andrew L. Kaufman Pro Bono Service Award for performing the highest number of pro bono service hours in the Class of 2006. The award is named for Professor Andy Kaufman who was a leader in supporting HLS's Pro Bono Service Program.

Professor Emeritus Louis Sohn, one of the 20th century's leading international law scholars and a member of the Harvard Law faculty for 39 years, died on Wednesday, June 7. He was 92.

On May 17th, more than 160 Harvard-trained financiers and lawyers met for a breakfast symposium at the University Club in Manhattan to hear a panel of experts discuss the growing involvement of hedge funds in the financing and management of start-ups and other companies.

The following essay by Professor Glendon was published in the June/July issue of First Things: Not for the first time, the world finds itself in an age of great movements of peoples. And once again, the United States is confronted with the challenge of absorbing large numbers of newcomers. There are approximately 200 million migrants and refugees worldwide, triple the number estimated by the UN only seventeen years ago.

In a case filed in the Delaware Chancery Court, Professor Lucian Bebchuk is challenging CA Corporation's assertion in an SEC submission that Bebchuk's poison pill-limiting bylaw proposal is illegal under Delaware law.

Professor Hal Scott and the HLS Program on International Financial Systems have released a white paper based on a half-day symposium that focused on key issues of corporate governance affecting companies, investors, and financial markets globally. Cosponsored by the Program on International Financial Systems, Standard and Poor’s and BusinessWeek, the symposium convened in New York on December 6, 2005.

The following op-ed by Professor Richard Parker was published in the June issue of American Legion Magazine: This Spring, the American flag was in the news again. Several high schools forbade students to display a flag--or even to wear red-white-and-blue clothing. Their reason was stark. The flag, they said, is controversial.

A recent report by the Trauma and Learning Policy Initiative (TLPI), a clinical placement for Harvard Law students, was the centerpiece of a daylong, state-wide conference hosted by the Massachusetts Department of Education on Wednesday, May 10. The conference, "Reducing Trauma as a Barrier to Learning," was attended by more than 250 teachers, school administrators, superintendents and mental health professionals that work in schools.

According to one prediction, the new technology will bring every individual "into immediate and effortless communication with every other" and will "practically obliterate political geography and make free trade universal."

Pulitzer prize winning legal writer Linda Greenhouse will be the 2006 Class Day speaker at Harvard Law School. The Supreme Court correspondent for the New York Times, Greenhouse will address graduating students and their families on Wednesday, June 7, as part of Class Day excercises.

This weekend, Harvard Law School's Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice will host a national conference to examine a number of legal, racial and political issues surrounding the death penalty. The event, "From Lynch Mobs to the Killing State," will take place May 5-6 in Ames Courtroom (HLS's Austin Hall) in conjunction with the release of a new book by the same title, written by Professor Charles Ogletree and Amherst College Professor Austin Sarat.

Luke Nikas, 3L, has been awarded the Professional Responsibility Award by the Northeast Region of the Association of Corporate Counsel. The award recognizes six Boston-area law students who have demonstrated an exceptional commitment to ethics. Nikas was nominated for his clinical work at the Hale and Dorr Legal Services Center.

Professor Baber Johansen will become the acting director of Harvard Law School's Islamic Legal Studies Program and an affiliated professor at HLS, while continuing to serve as a professor at Harvard Divinity School. Established in 1991, the program focuses on the study of Islamic law and supports open inquiry of both Muslim and non-Muslim perspectives.