David Kennedy

The Institute for Global Law and Policy at Harvard Law School has partnered with the Thailand Institute of Justice to launch workshops focused on strengthening the rule of law and sustainable development around the world. The most recent collaboration, held in Bangkok last month, comprised three sessions designed for faculty and scholars titled “TIJ Workshop for Emerging Leaders on the Rule of Law and Policy,” “IGLP Workshop for Scholars,” and “Student Workshop for Next-Gen Global Leaders.”...Law School professor David W. Kennedy, who serves as the director of the Institute for Global Law and Policy, said both institutes—at Harvard and in Thailand—bring something to the table in developing legal education around the world. “They [TIJ] offer their own programs and workshops for emerging leaders from the region and we [IGLP] provide them with some of the curriculum and offer them some of our faculty to help them implement their workshops,” Kennedy said.

Africa is “rising,” or so authoritative sources declared a few years ago. An Economist cover story in 2013 amplified the claim; the Wall Street Journal carried a series of articles on economic growth in Africa under this title. African “lions,” according to a report published as recently as September by the McKinsey Global Institute, are “on the move.” ... Those concerned about the health of democracy must reckon with the extraordinary influence of technocratic expertise. For, as David Kennedy, a legal scholar at Harvard, argues in a brilliant new book, “The World of Struggle: How Power, Law, and Expertise Shape Global Political Economy,” experts only appear to be describing pre-existing economic and political worlds.

On a cool spring day in May 2012, the members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) met in McCormick Place, Chicago. The 28 heads of state comprising the military alliance had come to the Windy City to discuss the withdrawal of NATO forces from Afghanistan, among other strategic matters...Not long before the Chicago summit, President Barack Obama had publicly declared that the United States would begin pulling out its troops from Afghanistan and that a complete withdrawal would be achieved by 2014. NATO was therefore set to decide on the details of a potential exit strategy. A few days before the summit, placards appeared in bus stops around downtown Chicago urging NATO not to withdraw its forces from Afghanistan. “NATO: Keep the progress going!” read the posters...Harvard law professor David Kennedy describes the human-rights training programs run by the US military in recent decades as courses in which the message is clear: “This is not some humanitarian add-on—a way of being nice or reducing military muscle,” he says. “We asserted, with some justification, that it is simply not possible to use the sophisticated weapons one purchases or to coordinate with the international military operations in which they would be used without an internal military culture with parallel rules of operation and engagement.”

It’s been just a year since Thomas Piketty’s “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” turned the respected French economist from the University of Paris into an academic and publishing rock star. Few could have imagined that a nearly 700-page text tracing wealth and income-distribution patterns in 20 countries as far back as the French Revolution would become a worldwide million-plus seller...Piketty’s status showed little sign of fading during his March 6 visit to Harvard to speak about the book before an overflow crowd inside Austin Hall at Harvard Law School...Sven Beckert, Laird Bell Professor of American History in the Faculty Arts & Sciences (FAS), Christine Desan, Leo Gottlieb Professor of Law at HLS, David Kennedy, Manley O. Hudson Professor of Law at HLS, and Stephen Marglin, Walter S. Baker Chair in the Department of Economics, later offered assessments of Piketty’s work.

Administrators from Northwestern University School of Law will help to establish the first U.S.-style law school in the Middle East. They have agreed to advise Hamad bin Khalifa University in creating a three-year juris doctor program in Doha, Qatar....The university first collaborated with Harvard Law School’s Institute for Global Law & Policy in 2012 to help develop the new law school. Harvard still is involved, institute executive director David Kennedy said, and is happy to see Northwestern join the effort. The institute stages an annual research conference in Doha. “Each year, we bring about 100 young colleagues in the law and policy field from around the world for an intensive week of collaboration and professional development,” he said. “We anticipate that cooperation will continue. I hope this effort, and our other ongoing collaborations with the Qatar Foundation, will contribute to the academic excellence and visibility of their new law school as it gets underway.”