Kathryn Spier

More than 60 Harvard Law students and 27 HLS faculty members took over the typically quiet tables of the library reading room for the first “Notes and Comment” event.

Harvard Professor Oliver Hart, a co-winner of this year’s Nobel Prize in Economics, has been a key participant in Harvard Law School’s program in law and economics for 25 years.

Litigation is often seen as an either/or proposition. You either settle out of court or go to trial and leave the outcome entirely in the hands of a judge or a jury. But Professor Kathryn Spier has researched another option: whereby parties go to trial with an agreement in place on the ceiling and floor for the plaintiff’s recovery.

In late May, four Harvard Law faculty members, Charles Fried, Michael Gregory, Kathryn Spier and David Wilkins, each shared a snapshot of innovative research with the HLS community, followed by discussion as part of the 2015 Harvard Law School Thinks Big lecture.

For the growing number of empiricists at HLS, there’s nothing quite so satisfying—or unimpeachable—as resolving a thorny, often contentious, legal or policy question through rigorous analysis of cold, hard data.

Stephanie Atwood ’13 started her 3L year several days early in a basement classroom of Wasserstein Hall in a new intensive “boot camp” on accounting and finance. In just three days, Atwood and 44 classmates learned a credit’s worth of previously foreign-sounding concepts such as internal rate of return and the cost of capital.

For the last several years, former Harvard Law School Dean Robert C. Clark ’72 has broken with tradition in teaching his mergers and acquisitions course. It isn’t enough to read leading cases, he realized; students still may leave the classroom without any real understanding of how to structure a deal, identify and avoid pitfalls, and recognize why personalities matter—in short, how M&As work in the real world.

Often, there’s a bond between the donor of a new chair and the scholar who occupies it.