Alumni Focus

Democrat Joseph P. Kennedy III ’09 has been elected to fill the Massachusetts congressional seat left vacant by the retirement of U.S. Representative Barney Frank ’77.

Roy L. Furman ’63 is vice chairman of Jefferies & Company and chairman of Jefferies Capital Partners. He has also produced five Tony Award-winning plays and musicals on Broadway and currently has five shows running.

“Constitutional Originalism: A Debate” by Robert W. Bennett ’65 and Lawrence B. Solum ’84 (Cornell). In a series of “dueling essays,” Solum advocates for constitutional…

Daniel Doktori ’13 knew he wanted to work in the venture capital field during his first summer in law school. After reaching out to Israeli venture capitalist Yadin Kaufmann ’84, he spent the summer in Israel and the West Bank working on the first fund aimed at investing exclusively in Palestinian high-tech startups.

Harry Bader has traveled to some of the most dangerous locales in the world, including Bosnia, Iraq and Afghanistan, in an unusual hybrid of environmental and counterinsurgency work.

When Brody Jenny first started the DC Volunteer Lawyers Project, she imagined eventually attracting 10 attorneys; it now has 430.

On a sunny day in June, seven members of the Sacks club, the team that won the Ames moot court competition in 1959, met on the steps of Langdell library to reminisce over what they called their “unlikely” victory, and to talk about where their lives had taken them in the fifty years since.

Barack Obama ’91 has won election to the presidency of the United States for a second term.

One of the highlights of the Second Celebration of Latino Alumni, held Sept. 27 to 30 at Harvard Law School, was a gala dinner Saturday night that featured a presentation of the Harvard Law School Association (HLSA) Award to Joaquin Avila ’73, a nationally recognized expert on Latino voting rights, and a keynote address by Mario L. Baeza ’74. (see video below)

The second Celebration of Latino Alumni, held at Harvard Law School from Sept. 27 to 30, drew about 200 alumni and guests to the school to share their experiences and reflect on the path of social change.

Barry Volpert J.D./M.B.A. ’85 is chief executive officer of Crestview Partners, a private equity firm he co-founded in 2004 after retiring from Goldman Sachs, where he was head of the Merchant Banking Division in Europe. Based in New York City, Crestview has about $4 billion in assets under management. "We like to focus on complex and difficult situations," he says, "that many other private equity firms tend to avoid."

“Client Science: Advice for Lawyers on Counseling Clients through Bad News and Other Legal Realities,” by Marjorie Corman Aaron ’81 (Oxford). No one likes to deliver bad news—attorneys included. But oftentimes providing honest and difficult advice is a crucial part of the job, and Aaron offers her own advice on how best to do it.

Steven R. Shapiro ’75 has been legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union since 1993, contributing to more than 200 U.S. Supreme Court briefs and working on a range of cases. The Bulletin spoke with Shapiro about his time at the 92-year-old ACLU and his take on the state of freedom in the United States.

After the release of her article “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All,” Anne-Marie Slaughter ’85 was engulfed in what she calls a “tsunami” of her own making.

Entrepreneurs, as management guru Peter Drucker has written, “create something new, something different; they change or transmute values.” That’s not easy to do, as two Harvard Law grads—one just embarking on a new startup, the other working to build a business he developed—can attest. But they also can speak to the excitement of seeing a need and seeking to fill it, and doing it in a way that has never been done before.

June 8, 2012, was a particularly busy day for Ronald Machen Jr. ’94, U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia. U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder named Machen to oversee investigations into the leaking of national security secrets to the press. In D.C. Superior Court, 71 defendants made their first appearances on charges that ranged from assault with the intent to murder, to sexual abuse and numerous drug crimes. Machen also held a press conference to announce guilty pleas made by former D.C. City Council Chair Kwame Brown, for bank fraud and campaign finance violations.

Barrister and writer Sadakat Kadri LL.M. ’89 is author of "Heaven on Earth," an exploration of Shariah law that begins with deep history (in ancient Arabia) and closes with contemporary reality: the varieties of present-day Islamic jurisprudence, gleaned from his travels to India, Pakistan, Syria, Egypt and Turkey.

A Q&A with Sadakat Kadri LL.M. ’89, author of “Heaven on Earth”