Latest from HLS News Staff

President Barack H. Obama ’91 nominated Dan I. Gordon ’86 to serve as Office of Federal Policy Procurement administrator. Gordon, who is currently acting general counsel for the Government Accountability Office, will be responsible for leading a key branch of the Office of Management and Budget.

Camp Julien is surrounded by reminders of Afghanistan’s past. The coalition military base--which sits in the hills south of Kabul, just high enough to rise above the thick cloud of smog that perpetually blankets the city--is flanked by two European-style palaces built in the 1920s by the modernizing King Amanullah. Home to Soviet troops and mujahedin during the past decades of war, the now-crumbling palaces are littered with bullet holes and decorated with graffiti in multiple languages. Uphill from Julien is the old Russian officers’ club, dating from the Soviet invasion and featuring a recently refilled swimming pool that overlooks the southern half of the city. The pool is said to have been the site of executions in the 1990s; the condemned were apparently shot off the diving board.

The family stories of black Americans and the findings of population geneticists make clear that Michelle Obama’s family history is far from unique. The vast majority of black Americans whose ancestors were enslaved in North America have some degree of mixed ancestry.

The HLS Environmental Law and Policy Clinic, under the direction of Assistant Clinical Professor Wendy Jacobs and Clinical Instructor Shaun Goho ’01, has filed an amicus curiae brief in the U.S. Supreme Court case Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition v. United States Army Corps of Engineers. The brief was filed on behalf of Trout Unlimited, a non-profit membership organization dedicated to conserving, protecting and restoring North America’s coldwater fisheries and watersheds.

Held every three years, the Holmes Lectures at Harvard Law School (HLS) are the institution’s most prestigious talks honoring a most prestigious legal scholar. The lecture series was established in 1954 as a result of the 1861 bequest of Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., an HLS graduate and associate justice of the United States Supreme Court from 1902 to 1932.

In February 2007, Harvard Law School’s Human Rights Program issued a report on gang violence in El Salvador, "No Place to Hide: Gang, State, and Clandestine Violence in El Salvador."

Diego, Anastasia and Juan (not their real names) are undocumented immigrants. They are seeking asylum in the United States because if they return to El Salvador, they say they will almost certainly be killed.

The op-ed by Harvard Law School Professor Lucian Bebchuk LL.M. ’80 S.J.D. ’84, entitled “Unblocking corporate governance reform,” appeared in Project Syndicate. This op-ed is the most recent installment of Bebchuk’s commentary, which he offers monthly in a series of columns entitled “The rules of the game.”

Harvard Law School Professor John Palfrey ’01 will testify before the House subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security today regarding two pieces of legislation designed to address cyberbullying and other online safety issues for children. A live webcast of the testimony will be available beginning at 3 p.m.

President Barack H. Obama ’91 has nominated Marisa Lago ’82 as assistant secretary of the Treasury for international markets and development.

The following op-ed by Michelle Kuo ’09 entitled “The Lost Student” appeared in the September 27, 2009, edition of the New York Times magazine.

This summer, hundreds of Harvard Law School students fanned out across the country and around the world to work as summer interns and fellows, exploring career options and using their legal skills in addressing a variety of problems. Here’s a look at four students and their summer experiences:

The following column by Harvard Law School Professor Hal Scott,“Regulatory reform needs rethink,” appeared in the Sept. 21, 2009, edition of Financial News Online. Scott is the Nomura Professor of International Financial Systems at Harvard Law School and the director of the Committee on Capital Markets Regulation and Harvard Law School’s Program on International Financial Systems.

Two Nobel Prize-winning economists—Harvard Professor Amartya Sen and Michael Spence—joined development expert Clotilde Fonseca, and HLS Professor Yochai Benkler ’94, co-director of the HLS Berkman Center for Internet & Society, for a discussion of the role of information and communication technologies in human development, growth and poverty reduction.

Paul Kirk ’64 will be the interim United States Senator for Massachusetts, filling the vacancy created when Edward M. Kennedy died earlier this month, Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick ’82 announced today.

The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation announced that Rebecca Onie ’03 is one of 24 recipients of the 2009 MacArthur Fellowship, more commonly known as the Macarthur “Genius Award.”

Today the U.S. Postal Service issued four new 44-cent stamps, commemorating Supreme Court Justices Joseph Story,Louis Brandeis 1877, Felix Frankfurter 1906, and William Brennan Jr. ’31.

On Sept. 3, four HLS professors joined more than 20 other corporate law and finance professors and scholars in an amici curiae brief filed in the case of Jones et al. v. Harris Associates, now pending before the U.S. Supreme Court.

Daniel Thies ’10 will have an article published in a forthcoming edition of the Journal of Legal Education.  Though students regularly publish "notes" in law reviews and journals, it is more unusual for them to have articles published.

President Barack H. Obama ’91 nominated Chai R. Feldblum ’85 to the position of commissioner of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission on Monday, Sept. 14.

Just two days after making her debut before the Supreme Court, Solicitor General and former Dean Elena Kagan ’86 returned to the Harvard Law School campus to give students an insider’s account of her new role.