Latest from HLS News Staff

The focus of the Harvard Law School Association over the next two years will be building awareness and engagement among alumni on a global basis. My mantra is “One World, One HLSA.”

In his first tour of duty in Iraq, in 2007, Marine Capt. Courtney Walsh LLM ’11 was one of two defense attorneys who represented Marines in Al Anbar Province charged with a range of infractions, from disciplinary violations to serious crimes tried in a court-martial.

William T. Coleman Jr. ’43 ('46), the venerable civil rights lawyer who served on the Brown v. Board of Education case, as counsel to the Warren Commission and as secretary of transportation in the Gerald Ford Administration, was a guest speaker at Harvard Law School on Dec. 1.

Harvard Law School Lecturer on Law Stuart N. Brotman has been appointed to the U.S. Department of State’s Advisory Committee on International Communications and Information Policy (ACICIP).

Harvard Law School Professor Lucian Bebchuk LL.M. ’80 S.J.D. ‘84, director of the Program on Corporate Governance, was selected as one of 2010’s top 10 “governance stars” by Global Proxy Watch, an international corporate governance newsletter.

In a Dec. 15 letter to the U.S. Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs and the U.S. House of Representatives Financial Services Committee, the Committee on Capital Markets Regulation urged the Committees to hold oversight hearings on the implementation through rulemaking of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act.

Joe Fernandez '91, a former Providence city solicitor, died Dec. 18, 2010, after a short illness. He was 46.

Cambridge University Press has published a festschrift paying tribute to Harvard Law School Professor Emeritus Detlev Vagts ’51, expert on international law, whose career at HLS has spanned more than a half century.

This fall, more than 20 recipients of the 2010 Chayes International Public Service Fellowship gathered at the home of Antonia Chayes, widow of HLS Professor Abram Chayes '49, to share stories of their fellowship experience. Founded in memory of Chayes, the Fellowships allow HLS students to spend eight weeks working with governments of developing nations and those making difficult transitions to peace, stability, and democracy, and with inter-governmental and non-governmental organizations that support them. 

JOTWELL—the Journal of Things We Like (Lots)—published “Top-Down Versus Bottom-Up Law Reform in Trusts and Estates: Future Interests and Perpetuities” by HLS Professor Robert Sitkoff on Nov. 22.

Anna Leah Fidelis T. Castañeda LL.M. ’96 S.J.D. ’09 was awarded the William Nelson Cromwell Dissertation Prize for her Harvard Law School S.J.D. dissertation: “Creating Exceptional Empire: American Liberal Constitutionalism and the Construction of the Constitutional Order of the Philippine Islands, 1898-1935.”  

The Committee on Capital Markets Regulation, an independent research organization directed by Harvard Law School Professor Hal Scott, reported on Dec. 9, 2010 that, during the first 3 quarters of 2010, the competitiveness of U.S. public equity markets in global markets showed slight improvement over 2009.

As a little girl in Berkeley, Calif., U.S. Navy Lieutenant Commander Sylvaine Wong LL.M. ’11 became enamored of the Navy when her dad took her each year to “Fleet Week” to clamber aboard aircraft carriers and visit other military craft.

For the first three months his battalion was stationed in Al Anbar Province in Iraq in early 2007, the situation was “highly kinetic,” recalls U.S. Marine Captain Siddhartha Velandy LL.M. ’11, with the Marines either under relentless attack or aggressively patrolling in order to create a secure environment.

Steven Schartup ’13 in a U.S. Army veteran who did two tours of duty in Iraq, one involving combat, and another couple of months in Kosovo in a peacekeeping operation.

It was between his junior and senior years at Princeton, in the summer of 2004 when the war in Iraq was not very old, that Graham Phillips ’13 decided to enlist in the U.S. Army.

U.S. Navy Lieutenant Commander Susan McGarvey LL.M.’ 11 was in the courthouse when Saddam Hussein was on trial for the Anfal Campaign, the genocide of Kurds that he ordered in the late 1980s.

As a U.S. Army intelligence officer stationed in Baghdad in 2006 and 2007, Ian Gore ’13 was a targeting officer, responsible for building “target packets” against enemy combatants: working with locals to find out who the enemies were, compiling evidence against them, explaining to the unit commander why a particular person should be arrested and detained, and describing the goals that would be achieved.

In a November lecture marking his appointment as the Henry N. Ess III Professor at Harvard Law School, Professor John G. Palfrey ’01 called for a new legal information system "grounded in a set of open data."

Harvard Law School Dean Martha Minow said she set out to write a book that acknowledged the limitations but celebrated the achievements of the 1954 Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. The result was “In Brown’s Wake: Legacies of America’s Educational Landmark," which was the cornerstone of a two-panel discussion at Harvard on Dec. 4.