Barack Obama

“Client Science: Advice for Lawyers on Counseling Clients through Bad News and Other Legal Realities,” by Marjorie Corman Aaron ’81 (Oxford). No one likes to deliver bad news—attorneys included. But oftentimes providing honest and difficult advice is a crucial part of the job, and Aaron offers her own advice on how best to do it.

June 8, 2012, was a particularly busy day for Ronald Machen Jr. ’94, U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia. U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder named Machen to oversee investigations into the leaking of national security secrets to the press. In D.C. Superior Court, 71 defendants made their first appearances on charges that ranged from assault with the intent to murder, to sexual abuse and numerous drug crimes. Machen also held a press conference to announce guilty pleas made by former D.C. City Council Chair Kwame Brown, for bank fraud and campaign finance violations.

For the first time in the history of U.S. presidential elections, both candidates of the major parties are graduates of Harvard Law School. Alumni remember the two presidential candidates as students.

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.”

Here’s the scorecard: Bush: $3.4 billion. Clinton: $14 billion. Obama: $91.3 billion. These numbers represent the net monetary benefits of final, federal agency regulations issued through the third fiscal year of each of these administrations. They were presented to HLS students and faculty on March 26 by Cass R. Sunstein, former Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law and current administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, a department within the White House’s Office of Management and Budget. As administrator, Sunstein oversees the federal government’s entire regulatory process. He was on campus to discuss “New Directions in Regulatory Policy.”

Ralph Nader ’58 and Bruce Fein ’72 visited Harvard Law School for a talk sponsored by the HLS Forum and the Harvard Law Record. At the event, “America's Lawless Empire: The Constitutional Crimes of Bush and Obama,” both men discussed what they called lawless, violent practices by the White House and its agencies that have become institutionalized by both political parties.

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

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.

Harvard Law School Professor Charles Ogletree delivered the Nathan I. Huggins Lecture on November 15th, 16th, and 17th at the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University. The lecture series, “Understanding Obama,” is divided into three parts: “From Barry to Barack,” “The Emergence of Race” and “The Conundrum of Race.” 

The only way we can keep Americans fully employed and maintain our global lead is by constantly improving their productivity and skills, writes Vivek Wadhwa, a senior research associate for the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School, in an op-ed in today's Washington Post. In his op-ed,  "On jobs, Obama needs to be a radical," published on the eve on the president's address to the nation, Wadhwa writes that American companies must be provided with the incentives to invest in their workers as they used to.

Harvard Law School Professor Randall Kennedy recently appeared on PBS’s Tavis Smiley show and CSPAN’s BookTV to discuss his latest book, “The Persistence of the Color Line: Racial Politics and the Obama Presidency” (Pantheon Books).

Harvard Law School Professor Randall Kennedy recently appeared on the radio program “The Takeaway” to discuss his new book “The Persistence of the Color Line: Racial Politics and the Obama Presidency” (Pantheon Books).

In a July 22 op-ed published in The New York Times ‘Opinion Pages’, HLS Professor Adrian Vermeule ’93 and his co-author, University of Chicago Law Professor Eric A. Posner ’91, address the current deadlock between President Barack Obama ’91 and Congress on raising the country’s legal borrowing limit by the August 2 deadline to avoid default.

In his July 10 op-ed for George Mason University’s History News Network, Harvard Law School Professor Kenneth W. Mack ’91 assesses the presidency of Barack Obama ’91, comparing it to that of Abraham Lincoln in terms of each president’s respective policy decisions.

In an op-ed published in The Huffington Post on May 5, Harvard Law School professor Alan M. Dershowitz assessed the decision made by the Obama administration not to release photographs of Osama bin Laden’s dead body for public scrutiny. 

In an open letter published recently in The New York Review of Books, Harvard Law School Professor Yochai Benkler ’94 and co-author Bruce Ackerman, professor at Yale Law School, detail the detention of Bradley Manning, a US soldier charged with providing government documents to Wikileaks, and call on President Obama and the Pentagon to document grounds for what the authors describe as “illegal and immoral” confinement.

In a recent op-ed in Slate, Professor Jack Goldsmith makes the case for why President Obama's campaign of air and sea strikes against Libya is constitutional.  Goldsmith says that while he agrees with "many of the arguments from critics of the intervention that  President Obama acted imprudently in committing American forces to a conflict with an ill-defined national security justification,"  he does not believe that the military action is unconstitutional. Goldsmith's op-ed, "War Power," appeared in the March 21, 2011 edition of Slate. A former assistant attorney general in the Bush Administration, Goldsmith is the author of "The Terror Presidency: Law and Judgement Inside the Bush Administration" (New York : W.W. Norton & Company 2007).

Three faculty who served in the Obama administration, and recently returned to HLS, talk to writer Elaine McArdle about gridlock, being part of history, living life at warp speed and the day the Easter Bunny blacked out the White House.

Joe Fernandez '91, a former Providence city solicitor, died Dec. 18, 2010, after a short illness. He was 46.

In an op-ed in the New York Times, HLS Professor Noah Feldman discusses the challenges and opportunities President Barack Obama faces, after the midterm elections, to have an impact internationally.  He writes: "To achieve more tangible foreign-policy results will require focusing on a familiar, thorny problem: the Middle East, where the Obama administration has already begun to engage." Feldman's op-ed, "Midterm Maneuvers," appeared in the Nov. 21, 2010 edition of the New York Times Magazine.