Alumni Focus

A judicial temperament involves many qualities. For Merrick Garland, patience is one of them.

Since graduating from Harvard College in 1985 and then getting his law degree, Alan Jenkins '89 had been on a career fast track, but he felt frustrated about the forces of injustice and inequality he saw around him.

President of the European Court of Justice Koen Lenaerts LL.M. ’78 keeps a photo engraving of Austin Hall in his home office in Leuven, Belgium. The image reminds him of the course he took from then HLS Professor Stephen Breyer ’64 (a 2L named John G. Roberts was also in the class), his LL.M. thesis with Duncan Kennedy, and hours spent perusing newspapers from around the world at Out of Town News in the Square. HLS is also now the alma mater of one of his six daughters.

Harvard Law School Visiting Lecturer Juan Carlos Zarate ’97, a former deputy national security adviser in the George W. Bush administration and a former assistant secretary of the U.S. Treasury for terrorist financing and financial crimes, recently spoke with The Harvard Gazette about the problem of money-laundering in the real estate industry—the scope of it, and what new oversight might portend.

How can you defend a foreigner who came to the United States with the likely intent of causing harm to Americans? For attorney James B. Donovan, a 1940 graduate of Harvard Law School, the real question at the height of the Cold War was: How can you not?

Earlier this year, Michelle Wu '12 was elected president of the Boston City Council, making her the first Asian American to hold that role. Wu recently spoke with Harvard Law Today about her time at HLS, her experience as a woman in politics, and vision for her new role on the Boston City Council.

Merrick Garland ’77—President Obama’s pick for the Supreme Court—has been very much involved in the life of Harvard Law School since receiving his degree from HLS nearly four decades ago. Dean Martha Minow described as “an outstanding, meticulous, and thoughtful judge with a superb career of public service.”

Harvard Law School hosted the first-ever Legal, Cultural and Strategic Issues in Counterterror Operations Symposium bringing together military officers from the 3rd Legal Operations Detachment and academic scholars whose work focuses on areas of Islamic and human rights law as well as on cultural and international security issues.

On Feb. 24, a panel of Harvard Law School professors, all of whom had personal or professional connections to the late Justice Antonin Scalia, gathered to remember his life and work.

Being an in-demand Hollywood screenwriter was not something Josh Singer '01 expected when he was at Harvard Law School.

Major League Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred '83 recently spoke with Harvard Law Today reporter Jonathan Topaz ’18 about his time at HLS and some pressing issues facing the MLB.

In a recent talk at Harvard Law School, U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch ’81, J.D. ’84 discussed criminal-justice reform “a transformative issue of our generation.”

Inspired by the interdisciplinary approach so many at Harvard Law School brought to studying law, Jorge Gonzalez S.J.D '13 is deploying that same approach in his own teaching and curricular development, translation work, and research.

John P. Carlin ’99, assistant attorney general for National Security, spoke last week at Harvard Law School on the National Security Cyber Threat, at an event hosted by the Harvard National Security Journal.

A recent panel discussion of the movie "Spotlight" at Harvard Law School touched on legal issues, secrets and shame, and even a potential lawsuit against the filmmakers.

Taking a leaf out of the American Civil Rights Movement’s book, Roma rights activists undertook a legal battle in European courts to challenge the pervasive discrimination that has kept them living on the fringes of society.

On Nov. 17, Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court Elena Kagan ’86, former dean of Harvard Law School, discussed statutory interpretation in a conversation with Professor John Manning ’85 as part of the Scalia lecture series at Harvard Law School.

U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Stephen Breyer made a recent appearance at Harvard Kennedy School to discuss his new book, “The Court and the World: American Law and the New Global Realities,” with HKS Professor David Gergen, and Nancy Gertner, a former U.S. District Court judge in Massachusetts and now a senior lecturer at HLS.

Investment executive and private investor Mitchell R. Julis JD/MBA '81 has made a gift to Harvard Law School to establish the Julis-Rabinowitz Program in Jewish and Israeli Law, named in honor of his father and mother, Maurice Ralph Julis and Thelma Rabinowitz Julis, and their families.

With a nod to its historic past and a look ahead to its future, Harvard Law School has formally launched the Campaign for the Third Century, which seeks to raise $305 million in support of students and faculty, clinical education, new and innovative research, and the continued enhancement of the Law School campus.