Latest from Lewis Rice

Not many judges have served on every court in their home state. And not many have been on the bench for nearly 40 years. But Robert Bell ’69 has an even more unusual distinction: He serves on a court that at one time ruled against him.

In her essay “Invisible Threats,” Harvard Law Professor Gabriella Blum LL.M. ’01 S.J.D. ’03 builds on themes from a joint book project with Benjamin Wittes of the Brookings Institution.

Fifty years after the Supreme Court determined in Gideon v. Wainwright that criminal defendants must be provided with counsel, scholars and practitioners from around the country grappled with continued limits on access to justice during an Harvard Law School conference in April titled “Toward a Civil Gideon: The Future of Legal Services.”

Harry Bader has traveled to some of the most dangerous locales in the world, including Bosnia, Iraq and Afghanistan, in an unusual hybrid of environmental and counterinsurgency work.

Entrepreneurs, as management guru Peter Drucker has written, “create something new, something different; they change or transmute values.” That’s not easy to do, as two Harvard Law grads—one just embarking on a new startup, the other working to build a business he developed—can attest. But they also can speak to the excitement of seeing a need and seeking to fill it, and doing it in a way that has never been done before.

Like many HLS students, Arvin Abraham ’09 took a job as an associate at a law firm after graduating. Yet, he did not leave his law school academic pursuits behind him. Thanks to a collaboration with a former professor, Lynn LoPucki LL.M. ’70, and a colleague, Bernd Delahaye LL.M. ’11, he is seeing the topic of his 3L paper expanded into a lengthy law review article to be published this fall.

Other than their Harvard Law degrees, Naomi Koshi LL.M. ’09 and Karen Freeman-Wilson ’85 don’t appear to have much in common. They live in opposite parts of the world and are different in professional background, ethnicity and age. And yet they share a certain connection. Both were recently elected the first female mayors of cities that are in the middle of their countries and are sometimes overshadowed by their neighbors. The cities are first in their hearts, however—the places where they grew up and which they want to help grow.

In the mid-1990s, Dennis Davis, then a judge of the High Court of Cape Town, sought out HLS Professor Frank Michelman ’60 to advise South African officials on constitutional interpretation. “From that moment on, he became a resource person for us. We regard him as one of ours,” said Davis. “It’s a very, very deep relationship.”

The Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision allowed unlimited political expenditures by corporations and unions, which have been used to help fund campaign commercials that have flooded the airwaves during this election season. In recent writings, several Harvard Law faculty members have explored how Citizens United affects a spectrum of stakeholders, including shareholders, corporations, unions and voters.

As Barack Obama ’91 was making criticism of Bush administration policies on terrorism a centerpiece of his campaign for the presidency in 2008, Jack Goldsmith offered a prediction: The next president, even if it were Obama, would not undo those policies. One of the key and underappreciated reasons, he wrote in a spring 2008 magazine article, was that “many controversial Bush administration policies have already been revised to satisfy congressional and judicial critics.”

Two years after considering the possibility of work stoppages in major league sports, the annual Harvard Law School Sports Law Symposium this year examined unresolved issues in the aftermath of collective bargaining agreements, as well as the ongoing problems of concussions and performance-enhancing drugs.

The presidency is more powerful, larger, and has more tools at its disposal than ever before, said Harvard Law School Professor Jack Goldsmith. But, he quickly added, that’s only half the story. The other half of the story—the forces that constrain presidential power—was the main topic during a March19 panel discussion of his new book “Power and Constraint: The Accountability Presidency after 9/11,” hosted by the Harvard Book Store at the Brattle Theatre in Harvard Square.

An array of luminaries from academia and the bench—and from around the world—came to Harvard Law School to celebrate Professor Frank Michelman ’60 and his influential work, as he prepares to retire after nearly half a century on the HLS faculty.

In a replica of a high-level White House negotiation session, teams of students in a new advanced negotiation workshop at Harvard Law School offered advice on how to handle Guantanamo detainees. Although the negotiation wasn’t real, for the students the stakes were still high: One team was later selected by fellow students to travel to Washington, D.C., to make a presentation on Guantanamo to U.S. Assistant Attorney General Ronald Weich.

The third Celebration of Black Alumni drew more than 700 graduates to the school in September and filled the campus with excitement and engagement, crossing generations. The Bulletin interviewed participants who graduated during each of the past five decades. They reflect on their own experiences and the path of social change in the era of the nation’s first black president.

Appearing at Harvard Law School a year and a half after being released from federal prison, a contrite Jack Abramoff expressed a desire to thwart the political corruption he once infamously practiced. The event on Dec. 6 was sponsored by the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics, whose director, HLS Professor Lawrence Lessig, interviewed Abramoff, a former lobbyist who pleaded guilty in 2006 to charges of fraud, tax evasion, and conspiracy to bribe public officials. “His experience,” said Lessig, “has an enormous amount to teach us.”

In response to a widely perceived dysfunctional political environment in Washington, D.C., attendees at a conference at Harvard Law School evaluated the potential and pitfalls of a possible remedy—a first-ever Article V convention to propose amendments to the Constitution.

The new CEO of pharmaceutical giant Merck, Kenneth Frazier ’78 is driven by high hopes for the company and what it can do

Children in foster care experience daunting challenges of stability and security in the school system, according to participants in the program “On the Road to Educational Equality,” held at Harvard Law School on May 24.

Over five seasons on HBO, the show "The Wire" tackled topics such as the drug war, wiretapping, corruption, and intergenerational incarceration—all topics worthy of examination inside and outside the classroom, according to Professor Charles Ogletree '78. That is why he established a new class based on the show—“Race and Justice: The Wire”—whose curriculum includes readings and discussions on drug policy, police practices, and legal tactics.