Article

An array of legal scholars, judges, practitioners and community leaders gathered at Harvard Law School on June 14 to discuss implicit racial bias, its presence in society and the law and new ideas about reducing its negative impact on disadvantaged groups.

The Harvard Law School faculty has voted to promote Benjamin Sachs, a specialist in labor and workplace law, from assistant professor to professor of law – a tenured faculty position.

Following a vote of the Harvard Law School faculty, D. James Greiner, a specialist in the application of modern quantitative thinking to legal questions, has been promoted from assistant professor to professor of law—a tenured faculty position.

“HLS Thinks Big,” inspired by the global TED (Technology, Entertainment and Design) talks and modeled after the college’s “Harvard Thinks Big” event, was held at Harvard Law School on May 23 in Austin North. During the event, five professors presented some of their favorite topics.

The op-ed "The Wise Way to Regulate Gas Drilling," by Professor Jody Freeman LL.M. ’91 S.J.D. ’95, appeared in the July 6, 2012, edition of the New York Times.

iLaw: Internet Technology, Law, and Policy, an intensive course run by Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, drew an unusual mix of students and professionals from around the world.

In late May, Harvard Law School Professor Jonathan Zittrain '95 was appointed chair of the Open Internet Advisory Committee. The committee was called for by the Federal Communications Commission to track and evaluate the effects of the FCC’s Open Internet rules and to provide recommendations to the FCC regarding policies and practices related to preserving the open Internet.

Two HLS students, Adam Gottesfeld '12 and Joey Seiler '12, recently won Rethink Music’s Genesis Project, a startup competition that aims to encourage and support creativity in the music industry. The duo will receive $10,000 in legal services from the firm Duane Morris, additional in-kind consulting and at least three meetings with venture capitalists.

Other than their Harvard Law degrees, Naomi Koshi LL.M. ’09 and Karen Freeman-Wilson ’85 don’t appear to have much in common. They live in opposite parts of the world and are different in professional background, ethnicity and age. And yet they share a certain connection. Both were recently elected the first female mayors of cities that are in the middle of their countries and are sometimes overshadowed by their neighbors. The cities are first in their hearts, however—the places where they grew up and which they want to help grow.

A diagram tracing the network of some of the HLS graduates at the top levels of the U.S. national security infrastructure in the administrations of Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama ’91.

On his priorities for the HLS Environmental Law Program, his experience arguing before the Supreme Court and on why climate change legislation is especially vulnerable to being unraveled over time.

In 2007, Joseph “Jody” LaNasa ’94 launched Serengeti Asset Management, an opportunistic hedge fund that focuses on value investments in the debt and equity of public and private companies.

Since January, when the Wasserstein Hall, Caspersen Student Center, Clinical Wing Building opened its doors, it’s become Harvard Law School’s hub. Its state-of-the-art learning and living spaces range from the lofty to the intimate. This photo essay captures a glimpse of the activity, the quiet, the light—from dawn to dusk.

Over the past 40 years the role of the general counsel has changed dramatically, according to HLS Professor David Wilkins '80, “so that it has become, in my view, the most important position in the legal profession, particularly in the corporate legal world,” he says. But until recently, that model remained uniquely American.

In the mid-1990s, Dennis Davis, then a judge of the High Court of Cape Town, sought out HLS Professor Frank Michelman ’60 to advise South African officials on constitutional interpretation. “From that moment on, he became a resource person for us. We regard him as one of ours,” said Davis. “It’s a very, very deep relationship.”

The Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision allowed unlimited political expenditures by corporations and unions, which have been used to help fund campaign commercials that have flooded the airwaves during this election season. In recent writings, several Harvard Law faculty members have explored how Citizens United affects a spectrum of stakeholders, including shareholders, corporations, unions and voters.

Professor Emeritus Charles M. Haar ‘48, a pioneer in land-use law whose scholarship focused on laws and institutions of city planning, urban development and environmental issues, died on January 10, 2012. He was 91.

Fasil Amdetsion ’07 has been writing about relations between Ethiopia and surrounding states since he was a student at Harvard Law School. Since last fall, he’s gone from writing about Ethiopia to working for its government.

Robert McDuff ’80 remembers clearly what first got him thinking about civil rights and the profession of law. In 1968, when he was 12, he read a newspaper account of a murder trial in his hometown of Hattiesburg, Miss. The victim was an African-American shopkeeper and civil rights leader killed by the Klan after he let other other African-Americans use his store as a place to pay their poll taxes.

Human rights lawyer Thomas Buergenthal LL.M. ’61 S.J.D. ’68, author of “A Lucky Child: A Memoir of Surviving Auschwitz as a Young Boy,” wrote that his experience as a Holocaust survivor made him a better judge. "I understood, not only intellectually but emotionally, what it is like to be victim of human rights violations. I could, after all, feel it in my bones."