Latest from HLS News Staff

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.

Grant Strother ’12 was the recipient of this year’s Roger Fisher and Frank E.A. Sander Prize for his paper “Resolving Cultural Property Disputes in the Shadow of the Law.” The prize is awarded annually to the best student paper on a topic related to negotiation, dispute systems design, mediation, dispute resolution, or ADR.

Harvard Law School Professor John Palfrey ’01 and Urs Gasser LL.M. '03, lecturer on law and executive director of Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, launched their latest book, Interop: The Promise and Perils of Highly Interconnected Systems, at a May 30 event hosted by the Berkman Center, the Harvard Law School Library and the Harvard Book Store.

Last July, Professor Lucian Bebchuk LL.M. ’80 S.J.D. ’84 and Columbia Law School Professor Robert Jackson, Jr. co-chaired a committee of ten corporate and securities law experts that submitted a rulemaking petition to the Securities and Exchange Commission urging the Commission to develop rules to require public companies to disclose their political spending. As of the end of May 2012, the petition has attracted massive support from a record number of comments filed with the SEC.

On May 10-11, the Harvard Law School Child Advocacy Program held a Prevention & Protection Brainstorming Workshop, which brought together researchers, advocates, and practitioners in the field from around the country to discuss strategies to prevent maltreatment and protect vulnerable children. The event followed last year’s CAP conference that examined race and child welfare. The founder and faculty director of the program, Professor Elizabeth Bartholet ’65, spoke about the workshop and her longtime efforts to improve the child welfare system.

In May, Harvard Law School Professor Mary Ann Glendon, who served as the former U.S. ambassador to the Holy See, was appointed to the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, an independent, bipartisan federal body that is principally responsible for reviewing the facts and circumstances of violations of religious freedom internationally and making policy recommendations to the president, secretary of state, and Congress.

During Commencement on May 24, Dean Martha Minow congratulated the Harvard Law School Class of 2012 on all that they accomplished while at HLS. Minow urged graduates in their future careers not only to take problems apart and work to persuade others, but also to celebrate and extend their role as designers.

Harvard Law School Professor Lawrence Lessig, director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard, gave the commencement address at Atlanta’s John Marshall Law School on May 19, 2012.

On the 100th anniversary of Paramount Pictures, studio employees and a handful of dignitaries gathered on Friday, June 1, 2012 to salute Sumner Redstone '47, the 89-year-old executive chairman of Viacom Inc., parent company of Paramount. The occasion included the naming of a major building on the Paramount lot after Redstone.

Margaret H. Marshall, senior research fellow and lecturer on law at Harvard Law School, was recently awarded the Radcliffe Institute Medal. Marshall, who is former chief justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Court and senior counsel at Choate Hall & Stewart, LLP, gave the keynote address during the Radcliffe Day luncheon on May 25.

A number of Harvard Law students received special awards this year during the 2012 Class Day exercises on May 23. The honored students were recognized for their outstanding leadership, citizenship, compassion and dedication to their studies and the profession.