Latest from Harvard Law News Staff

As part of the Defending Childhood Task Force, Harvard Law School Professor Charles Ogletree participated in a hearing on March 21 at the University of Miami School of Law, addressing the problem of children’s exposure to community violence.

U.S. Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. selected this year’s speaker for Class Day ceremonies at Harvard Law School. Class Day will take place on Wednesday May 23, 2012.

Columbia University announced on Mar. 14 that a recent book by Tomiko Brown-Nagin will be awarded the 2012 Bancroft Prize. Her award-winning book “Courage to Dissent: Atlanta and the Long History of the Civil Rights Movement” (Oxford University Press, 2011) offers a startling new perspective on the Civil Rights movement.

In a recent book review for The New Republic, Harvard Law School Professor Adrian Vermeule ’93 examines Richard A. Epstein’s “Design for Liberty: Private Property, Public Administration, and the Rule of Law” (Harvard University Press, 2011).

A scholar of administrative law and constitutional law and theory, Professor Adrian Vermeule ’93 has written the new book “The System of the Constitution” (Oxford University Press), in which he explores how individuals and larger institutions together shape the constitutional order. Vermeule recently spoke about his book and an event in London that featured discussion of his ideas.

Harvard Law School Professor Jack Goldsmith appeared on the Mar. 12 edition of NPR’s On Point with Tom Ashbrook alongside ACLU Executive Director Anthony Romero. The two addressed the controversy over Attorney General Eric Holder’s recent remarks at Northwestern University Law School in which he defended the legality of the Obama administration’s use of targeted killings of Americans suspected of terrorism-related activity.

Director of the Project on Law and Mind Sciences at Harvard Law School (PLMS), Professor Jon Hanson has long combined social psychology, economics, history, and law in his scholarship. In a recent Q&A, he spoke about the new book, the connection between law and mind sciences, and his own work in a field that has grown rapidly over the past 20 years.

David J. Barron ’94, Harvard Law School’s Hon. S. William Green Professor of Public Law, has been appointed by Governor Deval Patrick ’82 to the Massachusetts Board of Higher Education, the governor’s office announced Monday.

As youth increasingly turn to the Internet as a source of information, researchers, educators, parents, and policy-makers are faced with mounting challenges and opportunities. A new report from Harvard’s Youth and Media project at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society seeks to understand youths’ real experiences of online information quality.

At an event at Harvard Law School's Austin Hall on Feb. 27, Mary Nichols, head of California’s air pollution regulatory board, said that with climate change action stalled in Washington, D.C., the states are taking the lead in creating ways to reduce carbon emissions.

Harvard Law School Professor Matthew Stephenson ‘03 delivered the keynote speech at the 2nd annual Evidence-Based Anti-Corruption Policies Conference held on Jan. 11 and 12 in Bangkok, Thailand.  

In a Feb. 20 opinion piece for the online journal Project Syndicate, Harvard Law School Professor Mark Roe ’75 addresses European leaders’ support for imposing a “Tobin tax” on financial transactions.

This past January, three students from Harvard Law School’s Negotiation and Mediation Clinical Program traveled to Chile to investigate the Ministry of Justice’s neighborhood multi-door courthouse pilot program.

The dispute over raw milk has become one of the most heated debates in the food law community over the last several years—proponents and opponents alike have even staged protests at the White House. Raw milk is currently illegal in 22 states. On Feb. 16, the Harvard Food and Law Society staged a debate on the issue at Harvard Law School.

On Feb. 15, Harvard Law School Professor Lucian Bebchuk testified before the U.S. Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Subcommittee on Financial Institutions and Consumer Protection at a hearing entitled “Pay for Performance: Incentive Compensation at Large Financial Institutions.”

Harvard Law School Professor William Alford ’77 recently appeared on the radio program ‘The Takeaway’ to discuss the future of U.S.-China relations, specifically with regard to trade and Chinese intellectual property law, which Alford describes as “a work in progress.”

Since Matthew Schoenfeld ’12 became president of the Harvard Association of Law and Business last year, it has attracted an impressive array of alumni mentors for students interested in business-related careers. This year, he launched an initiative to raise funds to mentor another group—abused children. This January, Schoenfeld arranged for a partnership between the HALB and the Big Brothers Big Sisters of Massachusetts, to raise money for children in need of mentorship due to abusive situations and child welfare intervention.

On Feb. 1, the Harvard Law School Federalist Society sponsored a debate on the philosophical and legal issues surrounding the field of embryonic research. The event, “Embryo Ethics and the Law,” featured Christopher Tollefsen, a philosophy professor at the University of South Carolina, and HLS Assistant Professor Glenn Cohen, co-director of the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School.

On Feb. 2, in a panel discussion at Harvard Law School titled “Are Law Schools in Crisis? The New York Times Editorial and its Discontents,” three law professors addressed questions brought up by two pieces that appeared recently in the Times claiming that law schools are in a state of “crisis.”

Nancy Gertner, HLS professor of practice and former judge of the U.S. District Court for Massachusetts, was counsel of record in an amicus brief submitted to the U.S. Supreme Court in Dorsey v. U.S. and Corey Hill v. U.S. The Court’s decision will determine whether the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010, which redressed some of the inequities in the sentencing of defendants in crack-cocaine cases, applies to defendants who were sentenced after the law was enacted, but whose crimes were committed beforehand.