People
Duncan Kennedy
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Harvard’s S.J.D. community shares work in progress
July 19, 2018
Members of Harvard Law School’s S.J.D. community gathered on campus for the 2018 S.J.D. Association Workshop, “Between Law and Justice: Ethics, Politics, and the State,” on May 17. The Doctor of Juridical Science (S.J.D.) is Harvard Law School’s most advanced law degree, designed principally for aspiring legal academics who wish to pursue sustained independent study, research, and writing.
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Law Professors Debate School’s Support for Public Interest
February 9, 2018
As Harvard Law School celebrates its 200th year Professors and student activists gathered at Harvard Law School Wednesday night to debate the school's reported disconnect with public interest. The event, titled “Harvard Law and the Public Interest,” revolved largely around a report titled "Our Bicentennial Crisis" by Law student Pete D. Davis ’12 [`18]. Panelists Randall L. Kennedy, Carol S. Steiker ’82, Duncan Kennedy ’64, and Todd D. Rakoff ’67—all Law School professors—agreed that public interest law is essential for fighting inequality and that the Law School has the power to promote that interest.
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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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During this year’s spring semester, Mark Tushnet, the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law, is teaching a novel seminar called “Diversity and Social Justice in First Year Classes.” It combines classroom teaching with an eight-part public lecture series examining how issues of diversity and social justice can be integrated into the core 1L classes.
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Diversity and U.S. Legal History
December 7, 2016
During the fall 2016 semester, a group of leading scholars came together at Harvard Law School for the lecture series, "Diversity and US Legal History," which was sponsored by Dean Martha Minow and organized by Professor Mark Tushnet, who also designed a reading group to complement the lectures.
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Uniting in Diversity
April 8, 2016
President of the European Court of Justice Koen Lenaerts LL.M. ’78 keeps a photo engraving of Austin Hall in his home office in Leuven, Belgium. The image reminds him of the course he took from then HLS Professor Stephen Breyer ’64 (a 2L named John G. Roberts was also in the class), his LL.M. thesis with Duncan Kennedy, and hours spent perusing newspapers from around the world at Out of Town News in the Square. HLS is also now the alma mater of one of his six daughters.
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An op-ed by Duncan Kennedy. Contrary to many colleagues, I do think there is a possible principled defense of Reclaim’s actions with respect to posters in Belinda Hall, one which I find persuasive, though with some reservations. The defense applies even to what many of the faculty seems to see as the “red line” of taking down antagonistic posters in the occupied space, and a fortiori to moving them to another space. I don’t think it is coherent to frame the issue as whether (in one colleague’s phrase) “acceptance of this situation by us, in what I take it we still regard as a public space of the law school, could be explained consistently with free-speech and common-membership principles for our school and university to which I’d assume we are all committed.”
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Jorge Gonzalez S.J.D ’13: A career shaped by interdisciplinary and global perspectives
January 6, 2016
Inspired by the interdisciplinary approach so many at Harvard Law School brought to studying law, Jorge Gonzalez S.J.D '13 is deploying that same approach in his own teaching and curricular development, translation work, and research.
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A tribute to retiring Harvard Law Professor Duncan Kennedy written by former student Karen Engle '89, professor at University of Texas Austin School of Law.
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Legacies of Selfless Scholarship
May 4, 2015
In July, HLS Professor Daniel Halperin, will retire after after more than a half-century as a tax lawyer, professor and government official as will Duncan Kennedy who in 30 of his years on the faculty has taught one-fourth of every HLS entering class contracts, property or torts.
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Harvard Law Pushes Back
February 2, 2015
The University of Virginia held a two-day conference last February on “Sexual Misconduct Among College Students.” One of the speakers was the Education Department’s Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights, Catherine Lhamon, who touted her office’s efforts to compel colleges and universities, under pain of losing federal funds, to adopt draconian policies on sexual harassment and assault. These policies have raised serious concerns about due process and basic fairness for the accused, and an audience member asked Ms. Lhamon how she planned to deal with such “push-back.” Her reply: “We’ve received a lot of push-back, and we need to push forward notwithstanding.” The recent experience of Harvard Law School demonstrates the value of pushing back...Most institutions yield to OCR’s pressure without significant dissent. But at Harvard, 28 law professors—including liberal luminaries Elizabeth Bartholet, Alan Dershowitz, Nancy Gertner, Janet Halley, Duncan Kennedy and Charles Ogletree —signed an open letter, published in the Boston Globe, in which they described the new policies and procedures as “inconsistent with many of the most basic principles we teach.”...Still, the law school’s new procedures are a significant improvement over the university’s, and they promise more fairness than the kangaroo-court systems many universities have adopted under OCR pressure. The investigation of Harvard College is still under way, and the university could do far worse than to follow the lead of Harvard Law, the school that pushed back.
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Briefs: Some memorable moments, milestones and a Miró
October 1, 2012
In October 1962, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke at Harvard Law School on “The Future of Integration.” It was six months before he would be imprisoned in a Birmingham jail, 10 months before the March on Washington, almost two years before the signing of the Civil Rights Act and almost six years before his assassination. “It may be that the law cannot make a man love me,” he said, “but it can keep him from lynching me.”
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Sachs and Kennedy debate “Stones of Hope” and the relationship between poverty and development
December 1, 2010
On Nov. 19, Harvard Law School Professor Duncan Kennedy and Jeffrey Sachs, Columbia University professor and special adviser to the United Nations Secretary-General, discussed a new collection edited by HLS Professor Lucie White ’81 and Jeremy Perelman, S.J.D. ’11, before a large audience at HLS. That collection—“Stones of Hope: How African Activists Reclaim Human Rights to Challenge Global Poverty”—combines case studies from activists with theoretical essays on development to “tackle problems of disenfranchisement and poverty in the world,” said HLS Professor William Alford ’77, vice dean for the Graduate Program and International Legal Studies, who introduced the discussion of the book.
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2008 – Year in Review – Books
December 13, 2008
2008 was a prolific year for HLS scholars. Here is a roundup of this year’s faculty books.
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Recent Faculty Books – Fall 2008
September 1, 2008
“Security in Paraguay: Analysis and Responses in Comparative Perspective” (Harvard University Press, 2008) is based on two years of research by the HLS International…
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At Home in the World
July 29, 2008
The new curriculum embraces law’s increasingly transnational nature
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On the Bookshelves Spring 2004
April 1, 2004
Professor Alan Dershowitz reveals how notable trials throughout history have helped shape the nation in "America on Trial: The Cases That Define Our History" (Warner Books, May 2004).
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Tough Books
July 1, 2003
No one puffed on a Gauloises or sipped red wine, but people in the room had things to say about Kant.
