Latest from Seth Stern '01

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.

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.

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.

Mentorships between Harvard Law School professors and the students who followed them into academia have taken many forms over the course of two centuries.

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.

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).

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.”

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.

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.

Faiza Saeed ’91 arrived at Cravath, Swaine & Moore’s New York office as a summer associate in 1990, convinced that the prestigious law firm would be just a way station on her journey home to the West Coast.

President Donald Trump taps alumni for White House and agency hires

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch ’91 made friends across the political spectrum at HLS.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Bert Rein '64 came to Supreme Court advocacy later in life and has ­focused on litigation challenging race-based protections.

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.

After 15 years in Congress, Adam Schiff has emerged as a leading Democratic voice on national security.

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.

Jorge Elorza wins the battle to lead the city where he fought for social justice

For Freshman Senator Tom Cotton, politics and patriotism are nothing new.

Loretta Lynch ’84 becomes the 83rd attorney general of the United States.

Do recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions on class actions mean less security in numbers?

A nonprofit law firm whose clients have ranged from Hobby Lobby to a Santeria priest

Banks can no longer make bets with their own money. Some say the reform makes us safer; others say it simply transfers the risk.

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.”

Without prosecutions, the risk of another financial crisis is greater,says a prominent federal judge.

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,…

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Meet the President’s new lawyers—and their new laywers