Faculty Bibliography

On January 10, 2017, President Barack Obama delivered his formal farewell address to the country in Chicago, the city that had given him his political start. In reflecting on the achievements and challenges of his two terms in office, the president paid special attention to an issue that he knew would, for better and for worse, define his presidency: Race. In the simple, yet elegant, language that even his harshest critics have come to respect, the president said this about the state of race relations after eight years of the Age of Obama: "After my election, there was talk about a post-racial America. Such a vision, no matter how well-intended, was never realistic. For race remains a potent and often divisive force in our society. I’ve lived long enough to know that race relations are better than they were 10, 20, 30 years ago — you can see it not just in the statistics, but in the attitudes of young Americans across the political spectrum. But we are not where we need to be. All of us have more work to do." In this Report, we offer a preliminary assessment of how much progress had been made — and how much work remains to be done — in a part of the American economy President Obama knows well: the legal profession. We do so by examining the careers of the black graduates of President Obama’s law school alma matter in the 16 years since the beginning of the new millennium. Harvard Law School provides an important lens through which to study these issues. One hundred and fifty years ago this year, the Law School enrolled George Lewis Ruffin, who would go on to be the first black person to graduate from any law school in the United States. In the intervening years, Harvard has graduated more black lawyers — over 2,700 — than any law school in the country with the exception of the great Howard University School of Law. Among their ranks are some of the most powerful and influential lawyers in the world, including the 44th President of the United States and the country’s former First Lady, Michelle Obama ’88. In 2000, the Harvard Law School Center on the Legal Profession released a Report on the State of Black Alumni: 1869-2000 chronicling the achievements and continuing challenges of this remarkable group of lawyers on the basis of a comprehensive survey of the careers of over 650 of the school’s African American alumni. In this new Report, based on a second survey of the school’s black alumni, including those that graduated in the new millennium and matured during the Age of Obama, we both bring that history up to date and offer new perspectives for this new era. Collectively, we hope that these two reports will provide the “common baseline of facts” that President Obama identified in his farewell address as key to a civil dialogue in a functioning democracy, for a profession that will always have a central role in guaranteeing the freedom and equality that are the cornerstones of our democracy.

This book provides the first comprehensive analysis of the impact of globalization on the Indian legal profession.

This essay presents a practical vision of the responsibilities of lawyers as both professionals and as citizens at the beginning of the 21st century. Specifically, we seek to define and give content to four ethical responsibilities that we believe are of signal importance to lawyers in their fundamental roles as expert technicians, wise counselors, and effective leaders: responsibilities to their clients and stakeholders; responsibilities to the legal system; responsibilities to their institutions; and responsibilities to society at large. Our fundamental point is that the ethical dimensions of lawyering for this era must be given equal attention to—and must be highlighted and integrated with—the significant economic, political, and cultural changes affecting major legal institutions and the people and institutions lawyers serve.

There is vast and growing cause lawyering literature demonstrating how attorneys and their relationship to social justice movements matter greatly for law’s ability to engender progress. But to date, there has been no examination of the work of ADA disability cause lawyers as cause lawyers. Similarly, despite an extensive literature focused on the ADA’s revolutionary civil rights aspects and the manner in which the Supreme Court’s interpretation has stymied potential transformation of American society, no academic accounts of disability law have focused on the lawyers who bring these disability civil rights cases. This Article responds to these scholarly voids. We conducted in-depth interviews with many of the nation’s leading disability rights cause lawyers. What we found makes three novel contributions. As the first examination of the activities of these public interest lawyers and their advocacy, it brings to light a neglected sector of an otherwise well-examined field. In doing so, this Article complements but also complicates the cause lawyering literature by presenting a vibrant and successful cohort of social movement lawyers who in some ways emulate their peers, and in other ways have a unique perspective and mode of operation. The Article also forces a re-consideration of academic critiques of the efficacy and transformative potential of the ADA, because it demonstrates how disability cause lawyers have effectively utilized the statute to achieve social integration in the shadow of the Court’s restrictive jurisprudence.

Professors Stein, Waterstone, and Wilkins review Samuel Bagenstos’s Law and the Contradictions of the Disability Rights Movement, suggesting that the disability rights movement’s success has been limited by a lack of “cause lawyering.” Many constituencies that have lobbied for civil rights, such as people of color, women, and lesbians and gays, have had significant internal divisions, and the disability rights movement is no exception, as Bagenstos documents. However, say the authors here, these other movements have benefited from lawyers dedicated to the shared goals of the group and attuned to effective, focused litigation. In contrast, the lawyers who have represented people with disabilities before the Supreme Court have had little affinity with the disability rights movement as a whole; instead, these lawyers have focused on the narrow needs of particular constituencies. Thus, the movement has chosen to advance its goals–granted, often with substantial success–through means other than the Supreme Court. However, the professors suggest, conditions have changed and the time may be ripe for the disability rights movement to reengage the Court.

Kaufman and Wilkins mark the 20th anniversary of Problems in Professional Responsibility for a Changing Profession with a new 5th edition. Their new edition covers judicial, legislative, and executive developments in the traditional fields of conflicting interests and confidentiality, specialty fields of corporate and government representation as well as representation of those with impaired capacity. It also deals with the problems created by the increasing nationalization and internationalization of law practice, including the basic problem of trying to determine whose professional responsibility law governs the activity of lawyers when they engage in activity beyond their home jurisdictions. Various efforts to reform the profession here and abroad to meet the legal needs of clients and would-be clients are also presented. The authors have added substantial new material dealing with the demographics and institutions of law practice and their effect on professional identity.