Martha Minow

With students and faculty members joining in the celebration, a delegation from Sullivan & Cromwell LLP, a leading international law firm, came to Harvard Law School on September 18 to formally announce the establishment of the Sullivan & Cromwell Visiting Professorship of Law at HLS.

To celebrate the 20th anniversary of his appointment to the United States Supreme Court, Associate Justice Stephen Breyer visited Harvard Law School on Oct. 1 for an informal chat with HLS Dean Martha Minow, and later took part in a panel discussion with several HLS professors who examined his tenure and some of his most notable opinions.

During a Sept. 26 discussion at Harvard Law School, moderated by Dean Martha Minow, four of the School’s constitutional experts offered their thoughts on a trio of critical U.S. Supreme Court rulings involving same-sex marriage, voting rights, and affirmative action.

Harvard Law School will host more than 600 alumnae this weekend as part of "Celebration 60," a reunion event to mark the 60th anniversary of the first women graduates of Harvard Law School. The three-day event, which will be held Sept. 27 to 29 on the law school campus, is part of a worldwide women's leadership summit of Harvard Law School alumnae, titled "Leaders for Change—Women Transforming our Communities and the World."

Intisar A. Rabb, a leading expert on Islamic Law and legal history, will join the faculty of Harvard Law School beginning Spring 2014, with an appointment as a tenured Professor of Law.

Julius Genachowski '91, who served as chairman of the Federal Communications Commission from 2009 until May of this year, will teach a course to students from Harvard Law School and Harvard Business School in the fall semester. The course, 'Running a Federal Agency: Lessons from Business, Technology and Game Theory,' will be offered jointly by the two schools.

Dean Martha Minow has announced that Steven Klinsky J.D. '81 M.B.A. '79, and his wife, Maureen, have endowed the Steven and Maureen Klinsky Professorship of Practice for Leadership and Progress at HLS, the the first endowed professorship of practice established at Harvard Law School, designed to bring visiting leaders from a wide range of fields beyond law to campus to teach and bring inspiration and broad perspective to the school and, more generally, to Harvard University.

Ashish Nanda, the Robert Braucher Professor of Practice, faculty director of executive education, and research director at the Program on the Legal Profession at Harvard Law School, has been appointed director of the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad (IIMA), in India.

Dean Martha Minow announced this week that Scott Westfahl ’88 will be the new director of Executive Education at Harvard Law School.

Newly confirmed Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Gina McCarthy on Tuesday pledged action on climate change during the Obama administration’s remaining years, saying the concern is as much economic as it is environmental.

The biennial Harvard Law School Conference on Intellectual Property Law attracted scores of IP lawyers, business people, academicians, and judges to the school April 12 to discuss recent developments in IP law.

Ernest Shackleton’s first journey to the Antarctic in the early 1900s ended in a very public failure. On his second journey, in a race to the South Pole, he turned back within 100 miles of his goal. In his third expedition, not only did he fail to traverse Antarctica, but his ship was destroyed by ice, stranding the crew on ice floes for more than a year. So why do law and business students and executives in legal and business organizations study Shackleton as an example of successful leadership?

Many Harvard Law School alumni have been extraordinarily successful, many have lived unusual lives, and not a few have done both—including Morgan Chu ’76, one of the most successful IP lawyers in the world, who, along with his wife, Helen, is endowing in perpetuity the dean’s chair at HLS. Dean Martha Minow will be honored as the inaugural Morgan and Helen Chu Dean’s Professor.

Alex Whiting, who currently serves as the prosecution coordinator in the Office of the Prosecutor at the International Criminal Court, will rejoin the Harvard Law School faculty this July as a professor of practice. Whiting previously taught at HLS as an assistant clinical professor.

Sixteen public service visionaries and social entrepreneurs from Harvard Law School have been selected as the inaugural recipients of grants from the Public Service Venture Fund, a unique program which will award up to $1 million each year to help graduating Harvard Law students and recent graduates obtain their ideal jobs in public service—even if those jobs don’t yet exist. At the same time that it announced the recipients of the new Public Service Venture Fund, the Law School also announced the winners of three other fellowships for public service/public interest post-graduate work: the Skirnick Fellowships, the Kaufman fellowships, and the One Day's Work Fellowships.

Harvard Law School graduation festivities began on Class Day, Wednesday, May 29, and continued through Commencement Day on Thursday, May 30.

Fifty years after the Supreme Court determined in Gideon v. Wainwright that criminal defendants must be provided with counsel, scholars and practitioners from around the country grappled with continued limits on access to justice during an Harvard Law School conference in April titled “Toward a Civil Gideon: The Future of Legal Services.”

The Law School’s Class Day program was held on Wednesday, May 29, on Holmes Field, in front of Langdell Library. This year’s Class Day speaker, author and legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin reflected on his time at the law school. Professor Benjamin I. Sachs, who was selected by the class of 2012 to receive the Sacks-Freund Teaching Award, delivered remarks at the ceremony, as did Isabel Lima, Office Manager at WilmerHale Legal Services, who was the recipient of the Suzanne L. Richardson Staff Appreciation Award. Several students were recognized for their outstanding leadership, citizenship, compassion and dedication to their studies and the profession.

Harvard Law School has announced the appointment of Urs Gasser LL.M. ’03, executive director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, as a Professor of Practice.

John F. Manning ’85, the Bruce Bromley Professor of Law at Harvard, and an expert in administrative law, statutory interpretation, separation of powers law and the federal courts, has been elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.