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On March 12 and 13, the Asian Pacific American Law Students Association at Harvard Law School and the Asian American Policy Review at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government will be hosting the 10th Annual National Asian Pacific American Conference on Law & Public Policy. The conference, entitled "Border Crossings: Globalizing the Asian Pacific American Movement for the 21st Century," will feature the presentation of the inaugural Yuri Kochiyama Award for Social Justice to life-long human rights activist Yuri Kochiyama, who will also give the keynote address.

The Harvard Law School Library has announced the opening of a new exhibition entitled "The Legal Portrait Project Online." The exhibition is the culmination of an 18-month project to catalog, digitize and make available the law school's 4,000-item portrait collection of lawyers, jurists, and legal thinkers dating from the Middle Ages to the late twentieth century. The exhibition, which is on display in the Caspersen Room of the library, is open to the public from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. until March 31.

On Monday, March 8, British Home Secretary and Member of Parliament The Right Honorable David Blunkett will give an address entitled, "Human Rights and the Terrorist Threat: Defending the Democratic State and maintaining Liberty--Two Sides of the Same Coin." The speech, which is sponsored by the Harvard University Committee on Human Rights Studies, will begin at 5 p.m. in the Ames Courtroom.

On Saturday, March 6, the Harvard Women's Law Journal will hold a conference exploring the role of emotion in the law. The conference, which is free and open to the public, will feature a keynote address by Professor Kathryn Abrams of the Boalt School of Law and four panel discussions focusing on different aspects of the intersection of emotion and law. Registration for the daylong conference will begin at 9:30 a.m. in Pound 102.

The Harvard Law School Black Law Students Association and Professor Charles J. Ogletree Jr. are hosting members of the Congressional Black Caucus at the 21st annual BLSA spring conference entitled "Aggressive Advocacy: Our Role in the Courtroom, the Corporation, and the Halls of Congress Fifty Years After Brown v. Board of Education." The three-day conference will begin on March 5.

The Harvard Law Review has elected second-year student Thiru Vignarajah as its 118th president. Vignarajah was elected from a slate of ten candidates.

Beginning today, February 12, Harvard Law School Professor Janet Halley will hold a series of workshops to reexamine notable--and often controversial--books. Entitled "Book Trouble 2004," these discussions will explore the role specific books play in the development of people's professional roles, historical crises, social alliances and social movements.

The Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School has launched a new project, AudioBerkman, which will spotlight controversial issues related to the Internet, technology and the law. With one click, listeners can hear what industry experts and decision makers have to say about the subjects that are making news in cyberspace.

The Harvard Law School Immigration and Refugee Clinic at Greater Boston Legal Services is filing a friend of the court brief this week asking the U.S. attorney general and the Department of Homeland Security to treat women refugees seeking asylum protection fairly and consistently with its own rules and precedents. The clinic is submitting the brief in the case of Rodi Alvarado, a woman who is facing deportation back to Guatemala after suffering 10 years of human rights violations by her husband from which the Guatemalan government did not protect her. The brief, endorsed by more than 100 scholars, law professors and organizations, maintains that the violence and Guatemalan government’s failure to protect is grounded in Alvarado’s gender and her status as a married woman.

Third-year Harvard Law School student O. Grace Bankole has been selected as a 2004 Soros Justice Advocacy Fellow. The fellowship funds lawyers, advocates and organizers who initiate litigation, public education, grassroots organizing and advocacy projects that will have a measurable impact on a host of criminal justice issues. Bankole intends use the two-year fellowship to create a program, Families Empowering Families, that will provide intensive legal and advocacy training to friends and families of Louisiana’s incarcerated children.

Harvard Law Student Advocates for Human Rights, a student group that works closely with the law school’s Human Rights Program, has recently filed a friend of the court brief with the Indian National Human Rights Commission regarding the disappearance of thousands of Sikhs in Punjab by the Indian government in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The brief argues that international law requires the government to investigate thoroughly all allegations of disappearances and to accept and consider a wide variety of evidence in making its determinations.

Amanda Leiter has been named the first recipient of the Beagle/Harvard Law School fellowship. A 2000 graduate of HLS, Leiter will begin her fellowship at the conclusion of her current clerkship with U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens.

Yesterday 54 members of the Harvard Law faculty filed a friend of the court brief in support of the Forum for Academic and Institutional Rights, the Society of American Law Teachers and other plaintiffs in their challenge to the Solomon Amendment as enforced by the Department of Defense. In 2002, the Department of Defense had threatened to withdraw federal funding from universities that did not provide access to law students by military recruiters.

Harvard Law School Professor Laurence Tribe today submitted a friend of the court brief urging the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court to reject calls for a civil union law. The brief argues that the court's language in its recent decision in Goodridge v. Department of Public Health was unambiguous in its conclusion that state law could no longer prohibit gay marriages. Additionally, the brief contends that an advisory opinion allowing that prohibition to remain in effect but allowing "civil unions" instead would harm the court's credibility and hurt its ability to preserve the rule of law. Ninety of the nation's most distinguished constitutional scholars and legal historians signed the brief.

Each year more than 80 Harvard Law students assist prisoners in parole and disciplinary hearings as participants in the school's Prison Legal Assistance Project. For the first- and second-year law students that participation was threatened by a proposed new rule that would have barred them from representing Massachusetts inmates in prison hearings. However, the new acting commissioner of the Massachusetts Department of Correction has announced that the proposed rule has been rescinded.

HLS students and recent graduates have won an unprecedented eight Skadden Fellowships to pursue public interest work. The awards represent the most given to applicants from any single law school in the 15-year history of the Skadden Fellowship Foundation.

The hardest part of Stephan Sonnenberg's job last summer was telling his clients about the likelihood of a five-year wait for their day in court. Still, the Chechen refugees were excited as they sat with Sonnenberg '06 in Ingushetia, a neighboring republic to the war-ravaged Chechnya, as he collected testimony about their "disappeared" relatives for cases to go before the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.

Six Harvard Law School professors have joined with nine of their colleagues at Harvard Business School to comment on proposed Securities and Exchange Commission rules regarding shareholder access to corporate proxy elections. The letter represents a continued collaboration between faculty at HLS and HBS. The recently formed study group on corporate governance has been meeting once a month for the past year to analyze current corporate governance issues.

Assistant Professor Samuel Bagenstos is writing the plaintiff’s brief for a case scheduled to be heard before the Supreme Court this term, in which the state of Tennessee is challenging the Americans with Disabilities Act’s requirement that people with disabilities have access to state facilities. Bagenstos, who has worked on two other ADA cases heard by the court, describes how he got involved, how the law is evolving and what’s at stake.