Latest from HLS News Staff

An estimated 400 Harvard Law School students, faculty and staff gathered in Pound Hall for a “Thanksgiving for the Troops” on November 18, raising money and collecting items for soldiers serving in Iraq and Afghanistan.

This year's outbreak of the H1N1 influenza has demonstrated that contagions know few boundaries and spread wherever they can find an available host. Likewise, because of their broad jurisdictional rules, U.S. courts can be easy targets for "forum shopping" by foreign plaintiffs seeking redress against American companies for torts they claim have taken place abroad.

Milton Hershey had no children so he said he would make the “orphan boys of the United States” his heirs.To that end, the chocolatier founded the Milton Hershey School, which today serves 1,700 underprivileged children and has an endowment of $6.2 billion. In 2005, Hershey had the nation’s fifth largest endowment, which was about half the size of Princeton’s and Stanford’s but larger than that of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

President Barack Obama ’91 has nominated Joshua Gotbaum ’78 to head the U.S. Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation. This government-sponsored corporation is responsible for financially backing up the pensions of more than 44 million Americans.

The final round of Harvard Law School’s annual Ames Moot Court Competition was held on November 16, 2009, in Ames Courtroom. Richard A. Posner, of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, presided as chief justice. Joining him on the panel were Diane P. Wood of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit and Barrington D. Parker of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.

Harvard Law School Dean Martha Minow was honored at the 40th Anniversary Celebration of the Massachusetts Advocates for Children (MAC) on November 13, along with Marian Wright Edelman, president of the Children’s Defense Fund, and the late Senator Edward Kennedy.

Reasonable minds can disagree about Attorney General Eric Holder's decision to prosecute Khalid Sheik Mohammed and four other alleged Sept. 11 perpetrators in a Manhattan federal court. But some prominent criticisms are exaggerated, and others place undue faith in military commissions as an alternative to civilian trials.

HLS Professor David Kennedy ’80, Faculty Director of the new Institute for Global Law and Policy at Harvard Law School, co-chaired a major conference on financial regulation in China on October 29 and 30, at Peking University in Beijing. 

Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly, the Massachusetts Association of Women Lawyers and the Women’s Bar Association have recognized Professor Deborah Anker, LL.M. ’84, one of the world’s leading scholars and practitioners of immigration law, as a 2009 Woman of Justice.

Harvard Law School Professor Robert Sitkoff has been reappointed to serve a new five-year term on the Uniform Law Commission by Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick. Sitkoff is one of three commissioners representing the Commonwealth.  He has served as an interim commissioner since March of 2008.

The U.S. District Court in the Southern District of Florida has ruled that the claims for crimes against humanity and extrajudicial killings could move forward in two related U.S. cases against former Bolivian President Gonzalo Daniel Sánchez de Lozada Sánchez Bustamante (Sánchez de Lozada) and former Bolivian Defense Minister Jose Carlos Sánchez Berzaín (Sánchez Berzaín). The International Human Rights Clinic at Harvard Law School is part of the legal team that filed the two complaints against Sánchez de Lozada and Sánchez Berzaín.

Harvard Law School Assistant Professor Jed Shugerman has received the prestigious American Society for Legal History Cromwell Prize for his Ph.D. dissertation, “The People’s Courts: The Rise of Judicial Elections and Judicial Power in America.” The award was presented at the Society’s annual conference this past weekend.

“Much of the world…focuses on the bad things that happen when kids get placed in international adoption. When you shut down international adoptions in order to address bad things which occasionally happen, what you do is commit monumental human rights violations.” That was the testimony of Harvard Law School Professor and Faculty Director of HLS’s Child Advocacy Program Elizabeth Bartholet ’65 before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights on Nov. 6.

The American Constitution Society of HLS sponsored “The Constitution in 2020,” a panel discussion in November featuring Harvard Law School Professors Yochai Benkler ’94, Frank Michelman ’60, Mark Tushnet, and Noah Feldman, all contributors to a recently published book of the same title. The book’s goal is to contest the conservative idea that constitutional law should not be influenced by contemporary understandings of law and the political landscape.

Erik D. Ramanathan ’96 was named executive director of the Harvard Law School Program on the Legal Profession and its Center on Lawyers and the Professional Services Industry. Professor David Wilkins, faculty director of the program since 1991, was recently appointed by Dean Martha Minow as the new vice dean for Global Initiatives on the Legal Profession.

Harvard Law School Professor Charles Fried will serve as one of two Republican co-chairs of a new bi-partisan ABA Administrative Law Section task force examining possible improvements to lobbying regulation. The task force will look at deficiencies in current rules governing lobbying and suggest ways to strengthen the rules.

Adriaan Lanni and Matthew Stephenson ’03 have been promoted to tenured professorships of law at Harvard Law School, and current Lecturer on Law Michael Gregory ’04 has been appointed as an assistant clinical professor of law.

Samuel J. Heyman ’63, who established the Heyman Fellowship Program at Harvard Law School to encourage graduates to pursue careers in federal service, died on November 7 in New York City. Heyman, who was also a member of the Dean’s Advisory Board, was 70.

A year after the United States government allowed the investment bank Lehman Brothers to fail but then bailed out AIG, and after governments around the world bailed out many other banks, key question remains: when and how should authorities rescue financial institutions?

In commemoration of the 25th anniversary of the UN’s Human Rights Program, the UN’s highest human rights official, Navanethem Pillay, LL.M. ’82 S.J.D. ’88, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, came to Harvard Law School to discuss her current position as a human rights diplomat and how it differs from her previous roles as a judge and an impassioned activist.