Latest from HLS News Staff

HLS Professor Yochai Benkler ’94 wrote “Ending the Internet’s trench warfare,” an op-ed that appeared in The New York Times on March 21, 2010. Last summer, Benkler, the Berkman Professor of Entrepreneurial Legal Studies at Harvard and faculty co-director of the Berkman Center, conducted a major independent review of existing literature and studies about broadband deployment and usage throughout the world, following a request by the Federal Communications Commission.

The op-ed “The best trial option for KSM: Nothing” was co-written by HLS Professor Jack Goldsmith, a former assistant attorney general in the Bush Administration, and Benjamin Wittes, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Their op-ed appeared in the March 19, 2010, edition of the Washington Post.

The U.S. Senate confirmed Harvard Law School Dean Martha Minow’s appointment to the board of the Legal Services Corporation, a bi-partisan, government-sponsored organization that provides civil legal assistance to low-income Americans, today. Minow was joined by five other nominees in the confirmation by Executive Session, including John Levi '72 LL.M. '73.

The symposium "The NAACP: Reflections on the First 100 Years," explored both the history of the NAACP, which celebrated its 100th anniversary in 2009, and its future. The Feb. 26 event was held at the library’s Thomas Jefferson Building in Washington, D.C.

Harvard Law School Dean Martha Minow and four other law school deans have urged key lawmakers on Capitol Hill to end the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy. “The effects of ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ are marginalization, exclusion, and denigration,” wrote the law school deans in a March 18 letter to the Armed Services committees in the House and Senate.

“The conventional wisdom is that the Supreme Court is an heroic defender of the rights of racial minorities … I want to argue to the contrary. The Supreme Court has been a foe, rather than a friend to racial minorities in general, and African Americans specifically.” That was the opening message delivered by Harvard Law School Professor Michael Klarman in a lecture titled “The Supreme Court and Race” at the American Academy of Arts & Sciences on March 10.

Grainne de Burca, a leading expert in European Union law, European human rights law, and European and transnational governance, will join the Harvard Law School faculty as a tenured professor of law on July 1.

HLS Professor and former Solicitor General ('85-'89) Charles Fried co-wrote an op-ed “What Liz doesn’t get about lawyers,” with Gregory Fried, chairman of the philosophy department at Suffolk University. Their op-ed, which appeared March 15, 2010, on The Daily Beast, criticizes Liz Cheney’s group, Keep America Safe, for unfairly attacking the lawyers who have defended terrorists. 

Professor Adrian Vermeule ‘93 recently published “Intermittent Institutions” as part of the Harvard Law School Public Law and Legal Theory Working Papers series. 

Negotiations between the White House and Congressional leaders of both parties have been undermined by mistakes that could have been avoided by using a better negotiation process, says Robert Bordone, Clinical Professor of Law and Director of the Harvard Negotiation and Mediation Clinical Program at Harvard Law School.

On Friday, Feb. 19, the Women’s Law Association of Harvard Law School hosted the panel discussion “Change in the Community” as part of its fourth annual conference.

On March 8, Associate Attorney General Tom Perrelli ’91 returned to Harvard Law School to discuss the Department of Justice’s new violence against women initiative. Perrelli’s visit marked the first stop on a month-long college campus tour sponsored by DOJ.

Advocacy and litigation on behalf of women’s interests has expanded the rights and protections available to women, according to a group of panelists assembled for a recent women’s law conference, “Women for Women: Advocating for Change,” hosted by the HLS Women’s Law Association at Harvard Law on Feb. 19.

“Put yourself in the path of lightning,” was the advice of Senior Advisor to the President Valerie Jarrett, speaking at the Harvard Law School Women’s Law Association spring conference on February 19, 2010. The conference, entitled “Women for Women: Advocating for Change,” brought together leaders in the legal profession to discuss the challenges that women face in the courtroom, the workplace, and in the community.

This month, Harvard Law School Dean Martha Minow, the Jeremiah Smith, Jr. Professor, will deliver the 16th annual Rev. Theodore M. Hesburgh Lecture in Ethics and Public Policy at the University of Notre Dame  and the Robert M. Cover Lecture in Law and Religion at Yale Law School.

In today’s New York Times, Alan M. Dershowitz, the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, contributed a post, “Representing the Despised,” in response to the recent release of a video by a conservative advocacy organization, Keep America Safe, which takes aim at lawyers who have represented Guantánamo detainees and are now working in the Justice Department.Dershowitz’s post is one of four commentaries that appeared as part of the Times’ Room for Debate blog post “Attacking Lawyers from the Right and Left.” Dershowitz is the author of many books, including, “Rights from Wrongs: A Secular Theory of the Origins of Rights.”

Professor I. Glenn Cohen ’03, co-director of the Petrie-Flom Center, has written a working paper titled “Protecting Patients with Passports: Medical Tourism and the Patient Protective-Argument.” The working paper examines the growth of “medical tourism” – travel of patients who are residents of one country to another country for medical treatment. 

The Citizen Media Law Project, joined by the Public Participation Project, the Online News Association, and the Chicago Current, submitted an amicus curiae brief to the Illinois Supreme Court this week, urging the Court to reject two lower courts’ narrow interpretations of the state’s Anti-SLAPP statute.

Harvard Law School has awarded prizes for outstanding written work to Cassandra Barnum ’10, Jonathan Bressler ’10 and Ryan Park ’10.