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On unexpected heroes, revenants, and being the ‘fun sponge’

As staff attorney with the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia for more than three years, Assistant Professor Andrew Manuel Crespo '08 represented adults and juveniles charged with felonies ranging from armed robberies to homicides. Passionate about the work, he had no plans to become an academic. But early in his career, then-Dean Martha Minow engaged him in a life-changing conversation.

Assistant Professor Crystal Yang ’13, who joined the HLS faculty in 2014, brings an empirical focus to the study of criminal law. Yang, who holds a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard, has in the past focused her empirical studies on criminal sentencing. She has now turned her attention to the extensive use of cash bail and pretrial detention in the U.S., in order to understand their short- and long-term consequences.

"I think criminal procedure is a very fundamental part of the constitutional law of democracy,” says Assistant Professor Daphna Renan, who writes about structural constitutional law, administrative law, and the Fourth Amendment. “When can the government use force against its own citizens? When can it search individuals, communities and communications? How do emergent technologies challenge existing legal frameworks? For anyone who cares about power and how law constrains and enables it, there are no more pressing questions than these.”

There are more than 2 million people imprisoned in the U.S. today. One hundred years from now, historians are likely to be fascinated by this carceral state: How did we get here? Are there better options for society? Some of the answers—or, at least, possible alternatives—may lie in an examination of medieval England. As a Harvard undergrad, Assistant Professor Elizabeth Papp Kamali ’07 fell in love with medieval legal history. After graduating from HLS, she got her Ph.D. in history at the University of Michigan, then joined the HLS faculty in 2015.

Assistant Professor Anna Lvovsky '13, who joined the HLS faculty in 2017, always planned to teach. A legal historian - she holds a Ph.D. from Harvard - with a focus on the administration of criminal justice, she teaches a seminar on the history of policing in the U.S. as well as courses on evidence and criminal law that invite students to focus on the systemic effects of seemingly neutral legal rules.

President of Ireland from 1990 to 1997 and the United Nations high commissioner for human rights from 1997 to 2002, Mary Robinson LL.M. ’68 now leads the Mary Robinson Foundation—Climate Justice. She’s the author of “Climate Justice: Hope, Resilience, and the Fight for a Sustainable Future,” published in the U.S. in September, and co-producer of Mothers of Invention, a podcast that advocates a feminist approach to fighting climate change.

The first woman to serve as the director of the Division of Enforcement at the Securities and Exchange Commission, Linda Chatman Thomsen ’79 led the Enron investigation and expanded enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. She is now a partner in Davis Polk’s litigation department.

After serving as New York’s solicitor general and working in private law practice, Preeta D. Bansal ’89 played a major role in the Obama administration’s first term as general counsel for the Office of Management and Budget. In 2015, she co-founded the Social Emergence Corporation to explore ways to encourage communication and community. She is a senior adviser to the MIT Media Lab’s Social Machines Laboratory.

A former election lawyer and the general counsel for Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign, Katie Biber ’04 now works in Silicon Valley. After a stint as senior counsel at Airbnb, she’s the general counsel and corporate secretary at Thumbtack.

Founder of the Phenomenal Woman Action Campaign, Meena Harris ’12 is now Uber’s head of strategy and leadership, and she serves on the San Francisco Commission on the Status of Women. She was a senior adviser on policy and communications for the 2016 campaign of her aunt, U.S. Sen. Kamala Harris.

For Jameyanne Fuller ’19, outer space represents infinite possibilities. “I’ve always been an astronomy nerd,” she says. “I went to space camp in third grade, and I took all of the space-focused classes I could in college, but the technology wasn’t really there for me to be a science major.”

Harvard Law Professor Hal S. Scott was in his element, thundering up and down the aisles of a classroom in Wasserstein Hall and challenging each of his 70 Capital Markets Regulation students to match his enthusiasm and curiosity. After 43 years on the HLS faculty, Scott taught his final class at the school before retiring last spring. What is the best process, he asked, for ensuring that regulations for the financial system achieve their intended effect?

From algorithmic price discrimination to intellectual property and human rights to Indian Nations and the Constitution

Harvard Law School’s newest building opened this fall at 1607 Massachusetts Avenue. Inside, the LEED Gold certified structure continues the school’s commitment to experiential learning, with space suited for clinics and collaborative learning as well as research programs.

“Access to Justice,” the Winter 2019 issue of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences journal Dædalus, features twenty-four essays by leading experts in the field, including Harvard Law School alumni and faculty. It is the first open access issue of the publication.

The American Academy of Political and Social Science (AAPSS) has announced that Ambassador Samantha Power '99, diplomat, academic, and human rights advocate, will receive the 2019 Daniel Patrick Moynihan Prize in Social Science and Public Policy.

Yuko Miyazaki LL.M. ’84 sets a historic precedent as a female justice on Japan’s Supreme Court

The notice came in a white envelope, hand-delivered by a staffer at the project-based Section 8 development that my elderly grandparents lived in. From the outside, it looked like it could be a notice that they received on a weekly basis. However, this was a “Notice to Cease.” From what my immigrant Chinese family could tell, it meant eviction.

Statistics released by the Social Science Research Network (SSRN) indicate that, as of the end of 2018, Harvard Law School faculty members have continued to feature prominently on SSRN’s list of the 100 most-cited law professors.

Vicki C. Jackson, a leading expert on U.S. constitutional law, comparative constitutional law and federal courts, was named president of the Association of American Law Schools (AALS) at its January 2019 annual meeting in New Orleans.