Latest from Harvard Law News Staff

Following a vote of the Harvard Law School faculty, D. James Greiner, a specialist in the application of modern quantitative thinking to legal questions, has been promoted from assistant professor to professor of law—a tenured faculty position.

“HLS Thinks Big,” inspired by the global TED (Technology, Entertainment and Design) talks and modeled after the college’s “Harvard Thinks Big” event, was held at Harvard Law School on May 23 in Austin North. During the event, five professors presented some of their favorite topics.

The op-ed "The Wise Way to Regulate Gas Drilling," by Professor Jody Freeman LL.M. ’91 S.J.D. ’95, appeared in the July 6, 2012, edition of the New York Times.

In late May, Harvard Law School Professor Jonathan Zittrain '95 was appointed chair of the Open Internet Advisory Committee. The committee was called for by the Federal Communications Commission to track and evaluate the effects of the FCC’s Open Internet rules and to provide recommendations to the FCC regarding policies and practices related to preserving the open Internet.

Two HLS students, Adam Gottesfeld '12 and Joey Seiler '12, recently won Rethink Music’s Genesis Project, a startup competition that aims to encourage and support creativity in the music industry. The duo will receive $10,000 in legal services from the firm Duane Morris, additional in-kind consulting and at least three meetings with venture capitalists.

A diagram tracing the network of some of the HLS graduates at the top levels of the U.S. national security infrastructure in the administrations of Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama ’91.

In 2007, Joseph “Jody” LaNasa ’94 launched Serengeti Asset Management, an opportunistic hedge fund that focuses on value investments in the debt and equity of public and private companies.

Since January, when the Wasserstein Hall, Caspersen Student Center, Clinical Wing Building opened its doors, it’s become Harvard Law School’s hub. Its state-of-the-art learning and living spaces range from the lofty to the intimate. This photo essay captures a glimpse of the activity, the quiet, the light—from dawn to dusk.

This spring, artists transformed the walls outside Milstein East in the Wasserstein Hall, Caspersen Student Center, Clinical Wing Building into a gallery of quotations about law and justice. The quotations span the period between 600 BCE and the present day.

Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking,” by Susan Cain ’93 (Crown). Cain has written a manifesto for a large but often marginalized subset of the population: introverts. Though numbering about one out of every three people, they nevertheless frequently remain closeted in a society that idealizes the “oppressive standard” of extroversion, she writes.

The U.S. Supreme Court issued its ruling on the 2010 national health care overhaul on Thursday, June 28, 2012, largely allowing the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) to stand. A number of HLS faculty members offered media analysis of the Court’s ruling in the days following the ruling.

The U.S. Supreme Court issued its ruling on the 2010 national health care overhaul on Thursday, June 28, 2012, largely allowing the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) to stand. Several Harvard Law School faculty members weighed in on the decision.

The U.S. Supreme Court announces its ruling on the 2010 national health care overhaul on Thursday, June 28, 2012; a number of Harvard Law School faculty members have offered their opinions to the media in advance of the Court’s ruling.

Harvard Law School professors Carol Steiker ’86 and Nancy Gertner joined 13 other leading constitutional and sentencing law academics and law professors to issue a letter on June 26, asking U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee leaders to “convene a hearing at your earliest convenience to examine the Office of the Pardon Attorney’s conduct with regard to applicants for sentence commutations.”

Harvard Law School Dean Martha Minow has been elected to serve on the MacArthur Foundation Board of Directors. Minow, an expert on human rights and advocacy for disadvantaged populations, will join in September.

For a decade, Harvard Law School Professor Lawrence Lessig, a mild-seeming legal scholar, pursued the intricacies of updating American copyright law to reflect the rise of the digital era, the Internet, and new means of producing and disseminating texts, music, images, and software. He felt he was making progress: “The public was getting it. Businesses were getting it. Universities. Everybody had come to the recognition that ‘There is something wrong with the existing system,’ and that it needed to be updated—but we were making no progress in the context of policymakers.” At first, he was puzzled. But gradually he realized the problem lay in the sclerotic, gridlocked policymaking system itself—particularly in Congress.

Harvard Law School’s International Human Rights Clinic has submitted a supplemental amicus curiae brief to the U.S. Supreme Court in support of petitioners in a major Alien Tort Statute (“ATS”) case, Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum Co. Nine eminent legal historians joined the brief as amici: William R. Casto, Charles Donahue, Robert W. Gordon, Nasser Hussain, Stanley N. Katz, Michael Lobban, Jenny S. Martinez, and Anne-Marie Slaughter.

The American Law Institute has elected Robert H. Sitkoff, John L. Gray Professor of Law, to join its Council. The Council serves as the governing body of the ALI, the leading independent organization in the U.S. producing scholarly work to clarify, modernize, and otherwise improve the law.

The Institute for Global Law and Policy (IGLP) at Harvard Law School announced today that the Qatar Foundation has become a leading sponsor of the IGLP and will support a broad ranging research and faculty development program at the Institute.