Latest from Seth Stern '01
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Value Innovation
June 26, 2018
During his nearly 10 years on the Harvard Law faculty, Holger Spamann S.J.D. ’09 has always enjoyed teaching corporate finance, but he’s also found it challenging. Some students have worked as traders at hedge funds or in private equity and others have been newly minted English majors who haven’t thought much about business concepts. The solution he has been exploring this year is a corporate finance course divided into four different modules, any of which students can opt out of depending on their knowledge level.
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Bringing Blockchain to the Cowboy State
June 26, 2018
Caitlin Long ’94 left Wyoming for Harvard Law School and the career on Wall Street that followed, but she’s never forgotten her home state or its only university.
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A Monument to Madison
June 25, 2018
Professor Noah Feldman is the first to admit that James Madison will probably never merit a hip-hop Broadway musical like his partner in Constitution drafting turned bitter political foe.
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Mentors, Friends and Sometime Adversaries
November 29, 2017
Mentorships between Harvard Law School professors and the students who followed them into academia have taken many forms over the course of two centuries.
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Marbury v. Madison, Professor v. Protégé
October 26, 2017
Laurence H. Tribe ’66 and Kathleen Sullivan ’81 have teamed up on many cases since she was a student in his constitutional law class; now, for the first time, they will face off as adversaries in a reargument of the landmark case Marbury v. Madison, part of the Harvard Law School bicentennial celebration on Oct. 27.
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War Powers: A (Judicial) Review
August 2, 2017
The post-9/11 war on terror was only 3 years old when David Barron ’94 began researching whether presidents enjoy as much unfettered power to conduct wars as was assumed by many at the time. A dozen years after he began, Barron, now a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 1st Circuit and a visiting professor at HLS, has published the results of his research in a book titled “Waging War: The Clash Between Presidents and Congress 1776 to ISIS” (Simon & Schuster).
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Basketball Stars’ Go-To Guy
July 28, 2017
Alex Spiro '08 has emerged in short order as the go-to lawyer for professional basketball players who get in trouble with the law in New York--just one slice of Spiro’s clientele, summarized by sports and culture website The Ringer as “the rich, the famous, and the restless.”
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President Donald J. Trump has appointed Anthony Scaramucci ’89 to serve as White House communications director, upping by one the number of Harvard Law School alumni tapped to serve in the administration since Trump’s inauguration.
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Tournament of Champions
June 21, 2017
In January, it was as if the U.S. Supreme Court were playing host to a tournament of champions for past winners of the Ames Moot Court Competition, with three attorneys who argued Midland Funding, LLC v. Johnson having been on teams that won the competition within four years of each other at Harvard Law School.
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Judicial Temperament
May 18, 2017
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch ’91 made friends across the political spectrum at HLS.
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Architect of the Breakthrough
November 30, 2016
Last December in suburban Paris, 195 countries reached a landmark agreement to curb greenhouse gas emissions. For Todd Stern ’77 the Paris accord capped two decades of work to curb climate change.
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Regulated to Death
November 22, 2016
In their latest collaboration, Professor Carol Steiker ’86 and her brother, Jordan Steiker ’88, a law professor at the University of Texas, have co-written a new book, “Courting Death: The Supreme Court and Capital Punishment,” in which they argue that the Court has failed in its efforts to regulate the death penalty since Gregg v. Georgia, its 1976 decision that allowed capital punishment to resume.
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HLS and the 2016 Congressional Races
November 9, 2016
Tim Kaine ’83 will continue serving in the U.S. Senate after losing his bid to become the first Harvard Law School graduate elected vice president and he’ll be joined by several other alumni on Capitol Hill.
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The Wordsmith
November 1, 2016
Sarah Hurwitz has quietly helped craft some of first lady Michelle Obama's most memorable speeches--first working with her on her speech to the 2008 Democratic convention in Denver, and eventually going on to work with the first lady almost exclusively for nearly six years.
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Making History
October 31, 2016
Harvard Law School has produced plenty of senators, Supreme Court justices and two presidents, but no graduate has ever served as vice president. This election has presented the first opportunity in decades to end that drought with both Democrat Tim Kaine ’83 and Libertarian William Weld ’70 on the ballot as vice presidential candidates.
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Harvesting Progress
October 21, 2016
Carol Wang ’13 spent two years before law school crisscrossing Afghanistan helping nascent small businesses. Now, she and three military veterans who served there are building their own small business designed to boost the nation’s long-troubled economy.
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Quiet Intelligence
May 10, 2016
For more than seven years, John Carlin ’99 has been at the center of the most sensitive counterterrorism cases, which have often involved tricky technological questions—first as an adviser to FBI Director Robert Mueller and then at the National Security Division.
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Facing Down Discrimination
May 10, 2016
Raheemah Abdulaleem ’01 was standing on a Washington, D.C., street corner in 2009 on her way to work at the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division when a man yelled at her from his car to “go back to your country.” An African-American who grew up in Philadelphia in a family whose roots in the United States are nearly as old as the country, Abdulaleem was wearing a hijab, the traditional headscarf worn by some Muslim women.
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A Senior Rookie
May 10, 2016
Bert Rein '64 came to Supreme Court advocacy later in life and has focused on litigation challenging race-based protections.
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Pulling Back the Curtain
May 4, 2016
It is the rare law review article that directly leads the Supreme Court to change how it does business. But that’s exactly what happened after the Harvard Law Review published an article in 2014 by Richard Lazarus, revealing how Supreme Court opinions get changed after issuance, with little public notice.
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A Leader on National Security
October 5, 2015
After 15 years in Congress, Adam Schiff has emerged as a leading Democratic voice on national security.
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Tenacity Rewarded
October 5, 2015
The Yukos case—with its largest-ever arbitration award—was the culmination of Yas Banifatemi's career in international arbitration, which took root at Harvard.
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Trust in Providence
May 4, 2015
Jorge Elorza wins the battle to lead the city where he fought for social justice
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Politics and Service
May 4, 2015
For Freshman Senator Tom Cotton, politics and patriotism are nothing new.
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Prosecutor with a Calling
April 23, 2015
Loretta Lynch ’84 becomes the 83rd attorney general of the United States.
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In It Together?
November 24, 2014
Do recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions on class actions mean less security in numbers?
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Keeping FAITH
November 24, 2014
A nonprofit law firm whose clients have ranged from Hobby Lobby to a Santeria priest
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Ruling out Risk?
May 15, 2014
Banks can no longer make bets with their own money. Some say the reform makes us safer; others say it simply transfers the risk.
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Cautious about the Precautionary Principle
May 15, 2014
When writing laws, trying to prevent official abuse can actually create or exacerbate the very risks they are intended to avoid, argues Professor Adrian Vermeule ’93 in his new book, “The Constitution of Risk.”
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Main Injustice
May 9, 2014
Without prosecutions, the risk of another financial crisis is greater,says a prominent federal judge.
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HLS’s Party Central
April 27, 2014
Credit: Tony Loreti T.J. Duane ’02 (far left), party organizer and founder of the informational Web site HLCentral.com, joins classmates (left to right) Taryn Fielder,…
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In his latest book on constitutional decision-making, Vermeule exposes the risks of risk-aversion (video)
April 15, 2014
When writing laws, trying to prevent official abuse can actually create or exacerbate the very risks they are intended to avoid, argues Professor Adrian Vermeule ’93 in his new book, “The Constitution of Risk.”
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Reading the Tea Leaves
January 1, 2014
Shortly after graduating from HLS, David Satterthwaite Wertime ’07 and Rachel Lu ’07 launched Tea Leaf Nation, an e-magazine focusing on Chinese social media. The site had become a go-to destination for Western journalists, academics and decision-makers seeking insights into what average Chinese people are thinking.
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Standing Up for Gideon’s Mandate
January 1, 2014
In 2007, Corey Stoughton ’02 began a long, serpentine journey through New York courts when she filed a class-action lawsuit on behalf of 20 criminal defendants claiming the state’s public defender system had failed them. If all goes as scheduled, Stoughton, a lawyer with the New York Civil Liberties Union, will be in an Albany courtroom in March, when the case finally goes to trial.
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Salving the Wounds
January 1, 2014
Randall Kennedy has tackled plenty of controversial issues in his five previous books, ranging from interracial marriage to the intersection of race, crime and the law. The Harvard Law professor comes to the defense of affirmative action in his latest book, “For Discrimination.” In an interview with the Bulletin, Kennedy described his own evolution on the issue and the impact of the Supreme Court’s ruling in Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin, which was announced after his book went to print.
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Fixing Price Fixing
January 1, 2014
Louis Kaplow ’81 seeks to upend the academic debate and to suggest important reforms to legal practice in his latest book, which addresses the law and economics of price fixing. The Harvard Law School professor describes the law prohibiting this practice as “incoherent, its practical reach uncertain, and its fit with fundamental economic principles obscure.” And that’s just in the first paragraph.
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Rachel Brand ’98 is leading the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s campaign to roll back government regulations while also serving as a charter member of a government Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board.
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How It All Adds Up
July 1, 2013
Stephanie Atwood ’13 started her 3L year several days early in a basement classroom of Wasserstein Hall in a new intensive “boot camp” on accounting and finance. In just three days, Atwood and 44 classmates learned a credit’s worth of previously foreign-sounding concepts such as internal rate of return and the cost of capital.
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On the Court: The ‘10th justice’ becomes the 9th
December 6, 2011
As Harvard Law School’s first female dean and the first woman ever to serve as U.S. solicitor general, Elena Kagan ’86 has made a habit of making history. On Oct. 1, Kagan sat on the far right-hand side of the Supreme Court’s courtroom in a chair first used by Chief Justice John Marshall, poised to make history once again at her formal investiture ceremony.
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Great minds that did not think alike
December 6, 2011
In “Scorpions: The Battles and Triumphs of FDR’s Great Supreme Court Justices,” Feldman focuses on four men with remarkably diverse resumes, who, despite shared links to Roosevelt, often found themselves at odds once they joined the Court.
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John Kroger ’96: Where His Convictions Have Led Him
July 1, 2011
Kroger went from being a Marine reconnaissance scout to a Yale undergraduate to an aide for then-Rep. Charles Schumer ’74 and then for Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign, before he enrolled at Harvard Law School. After clerking for a year, he landed a job in 1997 as an assistant U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of New York, where he quickly racked up a list of high-profile convictions against drug dealers and mobsters.
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New Dawn on the Lost Horizon
July 1, 2011
Lobsang Sangay LL.M. ’96 S.J.D. ’04 is the first to admit he has rather big shoes to fill as he prepares to take office as prime minister, or Kalon Tripa, of Tibet’s government-in-exile.
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Marshaling Brennan
January 1, 2011
The reaction from Harvard Law School was decidedly cool 54 years ago when President Eisenhower appointed its alumnus William J. Brennan Jr. ’31 to serve on the Supreme Court.
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The Olin Advantage
August 16, 2010
Lisa Bernstein ’90 knew from her first day of law school that she wanted to be a professor, though as time went on, she wondered whether that would be possible without top grades or law review credentials. What helped to set her apart from other applicants, she says, was the paper she wrote—and mentoring she received—as an Olin Fellow during law school.