Alumni Focus

Alex Spiro '08 has emerged in short order as the go-to lawyer for professional basketball players who get in trouble with the law in New York--just one slice of Spiro’s clientele, summarized by sports and culture website The Ringer as “the rich, the famous, and the restless.”

President Donald J. Trump has appointed Anthony Scaramucci ’89 to serve as White House communications director, upping by one the number of Harvard Law School alumni tapped to serve in the administration since Trump’s inauguration.

Born in 1910 in Nashville, Tenn., James O. Bass '34, by all accounts, has always been an impressive man. Large in stature and even more so in spirit, he was widely known from a young age for his commanding charm and quiet intelligence.

Norman Dorsen ’53, president of the American Civil Liberties Union from 1976 to 1991, died on July 1. Active in many of the most prominent civil rights and civil liberties cases of the last 50 years, Dorsen regularly went against popular opinion to fight for fundamental freedoms.

Harvard Law School announced that it has established the Antonin Scalia Professorship of Law in recognition of the historic tenure of the late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia ’60. The professorship is endowed by the Considine Family Foundation.

Harvard Law School has announced that the family of the late Samuel Pisar LL.M. ’55 S.J.D. ’59, has endowed a professorship and a fund to support the International Human Rights Clinic.

In January, it was as if the U.S. Supreme Court were playing host to a tournament of champions for past winners of the Ames Moot Court Competition, with three attorneys who argued Midland Funding, LLC v. Johnson having been on teams that won the competition within four years of each other at Harvard Law School.

The mood was festive, rather than disputatious, on Friday evening as Supreme Court Associate Justices Stephen G. Breyer, J.D. ’64, and Neil M. Gorsuch, J.D. ’91, sat down to discuss “the rule of law,” capping off a Harvard Marshall Forum dinner in celebration of the 70th anniversary of the trans-Atlantic scholarship.

Top M&A attorney Faiza Saeed ’91 is Cravath’s presiding partner

In March, the Harvard Federalist Society, an organization of conservatives and libertarians espousing individual freedom, limited government, and judicial restraint, held its first alumni symposium on campus.

President Donald Trump taps alumni for White House and agency hires

Klemen Jaklič LL.M. ’00 S.J.D. ’11 has been elected judge of the Constitutional Court of Slovenia by the Slovenian parliament after being nominated by the president of Slovenia earlier this spring. His nine-year term officially started on March 27.

Neil M. Gorsuch, a 1991 graduate of Harvard Law School, was sworn in today as the 113th justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.

William T. Coleman Jr. ’46, the former secretary of transportation and one of the lead strategists and co-authors of the legal brief for the appellants in Brown v. Board of Education, died March 31.

In a wide-ranging discussion with Dean Martha Minow, the Hon. Reena Raggi, a federal judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit since 2002, shared her memories of late ’70s HLS, discussed notable cases she decided, and shared her thoughts on what it takes to be a successful prosecutor.

Former U.S. Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus ’75 returned to the Harvard Law School campus on Feb. 8 for a question-and-answer session moderated by HLS Professor William Alford ’77, vice dean for the Graduate Program and International Legal Studies.

Over the last decade, Sarah Hurwitz ’04 has managed to produce some of the most memorable and important work as a speechwriter for one of the nation’s most gifted orators, Barack Obama, and two of the world’s most commanding and admired women, Michelle Obama and Hillary Clinton.

In 1994, Felicia Henderson ‘97 had just finished presenting a case in her Property class when Professor Terry Fisher asked that she analyze specific details…

Steve Eisman ’88, an investor famed for predicting the 2008 financial crisis, spoke to HLS students in early March about why the economy crashed and whether the administration of President Donald Trump will undo the financial regulations enacted afterward.

Congressman Adam Schiff ’85 (D-Calif.) is in the middle of one of the year’s biggest news stories – the investigation of Russia’s role in the last U.S. Presidential election. He brought some perspective on that story to Harvard on Tuesday, when he spoke at this week’s Journal on Legislation symposium.

Tom Perez ’87, who most recently served as Secretary of Labor in the Obama administration, has been elected chair of the Democratic National Committee, the first Latino to hold that post.