Latest from Katie Bacon

In the fall of 1962, Caroline “Cal” Simon ’65 started at Harvard Law, one of 23 women in a class of 540. Her reflections on the experience are perfectly preserved in dozens of sharply witty letters she wrote to her family—letters she rediscovered when her father died. Together, they give an indelible sense of life at the school in the mid-1960s, and specifically, life as a woman there, a decade after women were first admitted.

Ronald Sullivan works to make the criminal justice system more accountable

Students represent the indigent in courts where judges ask, ‘Is Harvard in the building?’

An immigration lawyer impresses the MacArthur Foundation (Even the General would have been impressed).

Students witness the journey of the undocumented

This summer, when Chelsea Manning (then known as Private Bradley Manning) was on trial for passing hundreds of thousands of documents obtained from military computers to WikiLeaks, Harvard Law Professor Yochai Benkler ’94 testified for the defense. Benkler’s work—including his 2011 case study of the legal wrangling related to WikiLeaks—has put him in the middle of the debate over the balance between civil liberties and security in a post-9/11 networked world.

Back before students could get their readings in a digital format and listen to them on their computers, Joseph F. Nocca ’55, legally blind since childhood, found his own way to get through his law school assignments. A friend from college, Arthur J. Greenbaum ’55, also enrolled at HLS, offered to take the same classes as Nocca and read all the material to him aloud.

As a deaf-blind student with very limited sight and hearing, Haben Girma '13 learned that you must be a self-advocate and come up with creative solutions to the problems you face. If that fails, she says, then the law can be a strong ally.

Thirty-five years ago, after majoring in mathematics at Harvard and receiving a Ph.D. in the same subject from MIT, HLS Professor Gerald Neuman ’80 switched from the field of math to the field of law—from “truth to justice,” he said in an interview in his office in Griswold Hall. That decision has led to a career of teaching and writing on international human rights law and comparative constitutional law, and to his election last fall to the U.N.’s Human Rights Committee, a body of 18 independent experts who assess and critique countries’ records on civil and political rights.

On a sunny day in June, seven members of the Sacks club, the team that won the Ames moot court competition in 1959, met on the steps of Langdell library to reminisce over what they called their “unlikely” victory, and to talk about where their lives had taken them in the fifty years since.

After the release of her article “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All,” Anne-Marie Slaughter ’85 was engulfed in what she calls a “tsunami” of her own making.

A run for state office by a student committed to public service

The highly connected nature of today’s world has all sorts of benefits—but all sorts of potential costs as well, from loss of control of private data to a world financial system so intertwined that when one part of it falls, it’s hard to keep other parts from toppling along with it. In “Interop: The Promise and Perils of Highly Interconnected Systems,” John Palfrey ’01 and Urs Gasser LL.M. ’03 draw on their work at the HLS Berkman Center for Internet & Society to start developing a “normative theory identifying what we want out of all this connectivity.”

On his priorities for the HLS Environmental Law Program, his experience arguing before the Supreme Court and on why climate change legislation is especially vulnerable to being unraveled over time.

Robert McDuff ’80 remembers clearly what first got him thinking about civil rights and the profession of law. In 1968, when he was 12, he read a newspaper account of a murder trial in his hometown of Hattiesburg, Miss. The victim was an African-American shopkeeper and civil rights leader killed by the Klan after he let other other African-Americans use his store as a place to pay their poll taxes.

This spring, hundreds of people packed the Washington, D.C., Circuit Court to hear a challenge to the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority to regulate greenhouse gases, in one of the most closely watched cases of the year. Among them were the students in Professor Richard Lazarus’ Advanced Environmental Law in Theory and Application class.

Last summer, Professor Robert Mnookin ’68, found himself wanting to know more about U.S.-Cuba relations. “I had an idea that there was a very interesting set of questions related to when, how and whether the two countries would ever negotiate a reconciliation,” he says. He decided to investigate by teaching a reading group—a small, 1-credit class, where 2Ls and 3Ls are able to dig deeply into a given topic in a way that provokes extended discussion among the group. “I am not an expert on Cuba; I’m an expert on negotiation, and what a reading group allowed me to do is learn with the students about an area I didn’t know much about,” he says.

The scope of Harvard Law School's Environmental Law Program has grown significantly since Professor Jody Freeman LL.M. ’91 S.J.D. ’95 launched it six years ago “with the ambition of building the best environmental law and policy program in the world.”

Three times last month, Harvard Law School Professor Robert Mnookin brought in prominent Cuban intellectual Rafael M. Hernández Rodríguez via videoconference to speak to his reading group on the topic of negotiating with Cuba. According to Mnookin, it’s the first time a Cuban scholar has participated in an American seminar from Cuba itself, an event for which took Mnookin weeks of back and forth with Cuba’s Ministry of Culture to obtain permission, giving a glimpse into the continued hold of the Communist bureaucracy in Havana.

A new collaboration seeks to pair the academic expertise of HLS professors on issues of national and international security with the policy expertise and access of the Brookings Institution in D.C.

Regulating digital communications is like trying to control an explosion. FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski ’91 brings a full spectrum of skills to the job.

Cautionary tales and words of wisdom from HLS student entrepreneurs

This winter, as protests erupted throughout the Middle East, Jason Gelbort ’12 was one of the many obsessively watching the news, wondering if there was anything he could do to help. Then, on March 2, he went to a talk by Chibli Mallat, the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques Visiting Professor of Islamic Legal Studies at HLS.

Genachowski’s path to the chairmanship of the FCC in some ways mirrored that of his predecessor, Kevin Martin ’93, though they arrived via different sides of the political aisle.

Julius Genachowski ’91, who was classmates with Barack Obama and served as his chief technology adviser during the 2008 campaign, came to his job as Chairman of the FCC passionate about expanding broadband to all corners of the country. “I’m convinced that broadband will be as important to 21st-century America as electricity was to 20th-century America...”

Genachowski’s path to the chairmanship of the FCC in some ways mirrored that of his predecessor, Kevin Martin ’93, though they arrived via different sides of the political aisle.

Raj Kumar LL.M. ’00 wants to reform India’s legal system—one law student at a time.

Krzysztof Skubiszewski, who died earlier this year at age 83, lived a life shadowed and shaped by World War II and communism.

As a teenager growing up in a suburb of Chicago, Susan D. Page ’89 already knew she wanted to live overseas: “I think it was an early reflection of my feelings about the U.S. and how I fit in. I have never felt like it’s really been home.”

“Each of us is more than the worst thing we’ve ever done.”
Those words, written by noted death penalty lawyer Bryan Stevenson ’85, were very much on the mind of Katie Wozencroft ’09 this summer, when she made the four-hour drive from Atlanta to an Alabama prison where condemned prisoners are executed.

When Dennis Langer ’83 heard about Harvard Law School’s new Public Service Initiative this year, he knew it was something he wanted to support.

Bernard Koteen ’40 grew up during the Great Depression and went to law school during the New Deal. “There was great emphasis by the Roosevelt administration on serving the public, so it was natural for many of my classmates and me to have that concern and begin our legal careers in public service,” said Koteen in a 2003 Bulletin interview.

There’s a saying: Do what you love, and the money will follow. For Adam Szubin ’99, it’s a little different: With some early help from a Heyman Fellowship, he’s been able to do what he loves—and follow the money.

The law school’s investment in public service is paying dividends.

As a 3L at Yale Law School in the mid-1960s, Charles Donahue studied a series of decisions by Pope Alexander III (1159-1181) that became the basis of marriage law in Western Europe for the next three centuries. At the time, he didn’t realize how they would come to rule his own life.

Perched on the 21st floor of an office building next to the Statehouse on Boston’s Beacon Hill, Juliette Kayyem ’95 has a spectacular view of the city’s waterfront. But when you’re the person in charge of Massachusetts’ homeland security, that view prompts vigilance more than anything else.

Yash Pal Ghai LL.M. ’63 has spent his professional life quietly advising countries ravaged by war and colonialism on how to use the law to build democratic societies. Recently, though, his work has received extensive coverage, particularly in Asia, for his sharp criticisms of Cambodia’s current human rights record—and the even sharper response of that country’s prime minister, Hun Sen.

Scholars have long been fascinated by the democracy of classical Athens and the ways it is mirrored in democratic governments of today. Athenian law, on the other hand, has received little attention, since no modern legal system is descended from it.