Elizabeth Bartholet

Their parents had abandoned them, but the three small children clung together, a family without grown-ups. Roman took care of his younger brother and sister, begging for food and stealing potatoes from a field in Rudnoye, their Russian village...Roman lives in Watertown today, 6,000 miles from his hometown in the Russian far east. He was so small when he got to the United States five years ago that his height and weight — 4 feet, 4 inches and 57 pounds — placed him below zero percent on the international growth chart for children...Elizabeth Bartholet, a professor at Harvard Law School and faculty director of the Child Advocacy Program, says that adoptive parents hold the same legal rights as biological parents to make decisions for their children. “There is not much in the law that honors the right of siblings to contact each other just because they are blood siblings,” said Bartholet, who is not involved in the Davis case.

...Dr. Elizabeth Bartholet, Harvard Law Professor, was one of the non-Evangelicals who spoke at Together for Adoption. She is another fierce woman who has been a great proponent of international children's rights and has presented and promoted the idea that it is a basic human (and legal) right of all children, everywhere, to have a family. She is one of CHIFF's strongest proponents and allies. She proposes that we deal with illegal and unethical infractions individually, while moving forward with giving children from all countries families.

Reacting to an op-ed signed by more than a quarter of the Harvard Law School faculty that condemned the University's new sexual assault policy, University Title IX Officer Mia Karvonides on Monday defended the role she and her office play in the investigatory process..."There were just a huge number of people on the faculty who were concerned about the nature of the Harvard University policy,” Law School professor Elizabeth Bartholet said...“My sense honestly is that the faculty by and large is proud that we are standing up on principle and perfectly clear that what is being demanded for us is poor and actually wrong,” Charles R. Nesson ’60, law school professor and one of the op-ed’s signatories, said.

Harvard overhauled its sexual misconduct policy for the first time, defining the term "sexual harrassment." As Norah O'Donnell reports, current and former professors say the new procedures "lack the most basic elements of fairness and due process." Includes interview with Professor Elizabeth Bartholet.

Twenty-eight current and retired Harvard Law School professors are asking the university to abandon its new sexual misconduct policy and craft different guidelines for investigating allegations, asserting that the new rules violate the due process rights of the accused. “This is an issue of political correctness run amok,” said Alan M. Dershowitz, an emeritus Harvard Law professor who was among the faculty members signing an article, sent to the Globe’s Opinion page, that is critical of the new procedures...The professors said the new policy fails to ensure adequate representation for the accused and includes rules governing sexual conduct between two impaired students that are “starkly one-sided as between complainants and respondents, and entirely inadequate to address the complex issues involved in these unfortunate situations involving extreme use and abuse of alcohol and drugs by our students.” In addition to Dershowitz, faculty members who signed the letter included Elizabeth Bartholet, Nancy Gertner, and Charles Ogletree.

...Before the halt, Guatemala was one of the most popular nations for Americans looking to adopt, its system sending 4,000 children a year to this country. Now, some experts say, the closure of that adoption pipeline is contributing to the flow of unaccompanied children who have poured into the United States from Central America over the past year...Fueling antiadoption sentiment in Guatemala is “a kind of nationalist attitude that says, 'We don't need this former imperialist power (America) ripping us off again,’” said Elizabeth Bartholet, a Harvard law professor and international adoption expert.

Marshals arrested the only woman on their 15 Most Wanted list Wednesday, bringing to an end a five-year search for Janet Barreto and her husband, Ramon Barreto – both accused of severe abuse of children they had adopted abroad, including a two-year-old girl who died as a result…But in general, “abuse and neglect is far more likely to occur in families where the children are the biological children than it is to occur in adoptive families,” says Elizabeth Bartholet, a Harvard law professor who studies child abuse.

…There are various reasons why international adoption is changing rapidly, including the embrace of The Hague Protocol and, in some parts of the world, a backlash to international adoption. Harvard Law School professor Elizabeth Bartholet, who is director of its child advocacy program, said some charities have played a role in declining international adoptions by lobbying developing countries to stop allowing international adoptions, saying the children are better off in their own countries. Bartholet disagrees. “If you look overall at the kids placed, overwhelmingly they do really well and end up with really good, loving and nurturing parents.” The alternative, she added, is often institutionalization, which is bad for children.

Baltimore is changing the way it handles cases of alleged child abuse and neglect — part of a broad social-services strategy that has been touted by Maryland officials but abandoned in some other states…Elizabeth Bartholet, a professor at Harvard Law School, said an emerging body of research shows that claims about the success of alternative approaches might not be what they seem. Some research is promoted by groups pushing a premise that children are almost always better off staying in their home, she said. She's worried that will lead to federal policy changes and further drain resources from traditional child protective services in favor of in-home treatment programs, leaving the most vulnerable children in dangerous situations.

Michigan, like other states, struggles to keep abused and neglected children safe while controlling the number of children in foster care, which is costly. Our law and policy attempt to balance the protection of maltreated children (the paramount consideration), respect for parents’ rights to raise their children, and the state’s interest in keeping children safe, all with too little money…Conservatives like these programs because they hope to save money, liberals because they minimize government intervention into families and because they often think child protection is simply an attack on poor and minority parents. Harvard Law Professor Elizabeth Bartholet calls this right-left convergence “the unholy alliance.”

In 1983, Evan Wolfson ’83 authored a prescient third year paper titled “Samesex Marriage and Morality: The Human Rights Vision of the Constitution.” Thirty years…

Inspiring the next generation of successful “agents of social change” is the mission of Harvard Law School Professor Elizabeth Bartholet ’65 and Lecturer on…