Latest from HLS News Staff

Harvard Law School’s first ever online course launched Monday, opening up “Copyright,” a class taught by Law School professor William W. Fisher, III, to hundreds of people worldwide. HLS1x: “Copyright,” which is offered through the Harvard branch of the online learning platform edX, is closely modeled after the Law School course taught by Fisher since 1994.

On Jan. 11, the Harvard Law School Library announced the opening of a new exhibit titled “Extra! Extra! Read All About It: A Tale of True Crime.” Featuring materials from the library’s Historical & Special Collections, the exhibit examines a short chapter in the United States’ history of true crime narratives, covering topics such as serialized true crime literature, crime photography in newspapers, and new angles on the media coverage of the Sacco and Vanzetti case.

Daniel J. Meltzer ’75, the Story professor of law at Harvard Law School, has been appointed as the next Director of the American Law Institute (ALI). The ALI announced the appointment on January 18, 2013.

The Securities and Exchange Commission recently indicated in an entry in the Office of Management and Budget’s Unified Agenda that it plans to issue by April 2013 a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking on requiring public companies to disclose their spending on politics. The adoption of such a rule was urged in a rulemaking petition submitted by a committee of ten law professors co-chaired by Harvard Law School Professor Lucian Bebchuk LL.M. ’80 S.J.D. ’84 and by a record number of supporting comments subsequently filed with the SEC.

On Dec. 6-8, 2012, the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, together with seven international co-organizers, hosted a symposium at Harvard Law School titled Internet-Driven Developments: Structural Changes and Tipping Points, convening representatives from Internet and society research centers spanning 5 continents and 22 countries.

At a Jan. 8 event, Harvard Law School Professor Laurence Tribe participated in a panel discussion titled “Gun Violence: A Public Health Crisis.” The event, which was co-sponsored by the Reuters news agency and the Harvard School of Public Health, was part of The Forum at HSPH, a discussion series that aims to provide decision-makers with a global platform to address policy choices and scientific controversies.

Professor Hal Scott, director of the Harvard Law School Program on International Financial Systems, recently gathered public and private sector financial leaders from Brazil and the U.S. to examine issues affecting the financial relationship between the two countries.

In recent weeks, a number of HLS faculty have weighed in on issues surrounding the fiscal cliff negotiations.

An article written by Harvard Law School Professor Charles Fried was named an exemplar of good legal writing by The Green Bag, a quarterly journal devoted to readable, concise, and entertaining legal scholarship. A number of Harvard Law School alumni were also included on Green Bag’s 2012 list of “Exemplary Legal Writing.” Their work will appear in the “2013 Almanac & Reader.”

On Dec. 11, Harvard Law School’s Program on the Legal Profession (PLP) and the Indian School of Business (ISB) co-hosted a major international conference on the future of corporate business in India and the role of the legal profession. The event was held at the ISB campus in Hyderabad, India.

In a first for the Harvard Law School Library, the Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. Digital Suite, which went live on the web Dec. 11, aggregates multiple archival holdings into a single, hyperaccessible digital suite that anyone with a computer can search, browse, and tag.

Daniel Shapiro, an affiliated faculty member with the Harvard Law School Program on Negotiation, recently wrote an opinion piece on "Negotiating the Fiscal Crisis." Shapiro is an assistant professor of psychology at Harvard Medical School/McLean Hospital, founder and director of the Harvard International Negotiation Program, and co-author of "Beyond Reason: Using Emotions as You Negotiate."

The highly connected nature of today’s world has all sorts of benefits—but all sorts of potential costs as well, from loss of control of private data to a world financial system so intertwined that when one part of it falls, it’s hard to keep other parts from toppling along with it. In “Interop: The Promise and Perils of Highly Interconnected Systems,” John Palfrey ’01 and Urs Gasser LL.M. ’03 draw on their work at the HLS Berkman Center for Internet & Society to start developing a “normative theory identifying what we want out of all this connectivity.”