Alumni Focus

U.S. Senate candidate Ted Cruz calls for a “return to the framers’ vision of a constitutionally limited government”

Donna Levin ’83 writes that she “abandoned the tranquillity of life as a litigator to join the fast-paced world of crossword construction.” This is her first puzzle for the Harvard Law Bulletin, but since 2005, approximately 250 of her puzzles have been published by major newspapers around the country.

Like many HLS students, Arvin Abraham ’09 took a job as an associate at a law firm after graduating. Yet, he did not leave his law school academic pursuits behind him. Thanks to a collaboration with a former professor, Lynn LoPucki LL.M. ’70, and a colleague, Bernd Delahaye LL.M. ’11, he is seeing the topic of his 3L paper expanded into a lengthy law review article to be published this fall.

What he’ll miss most, what he’ll do next, and the song he can’t get out of his head

For the first time in the history of U.S. presidential elections, both candidates of the major parties are graduates of Harvard Law School. Alumni remember the two presidential candidates as students.

Viet D. Dinh '93, founding partner of Bancroft and a professor of law at Georgetown University Law Center, spoke at Harvard Law School on Sept. 18 at an event sponsored by Harvard Law School's Program on the Legal Profession. Dinh, who served as U.S. Assistant Attorney General for Legal Policy from 2001 to 2003 and played a key role in developing legal policy initiatives to combat terrorism, focused his remarks on “Peripatetic Reflections: Government, Academia and Boutique Law Practice."

Undergraduates gathered at Farkas Hall last week to audition for a workshop that taps into the power and poetry of language. Harvard’s new dramatic arts offering “Hip Hop and Spoken Word: Theater Performance Laboratory” is being taught by visiting lecturer Bryonn Bain '01, an activist, rapper, poet, and musician.

Stephen Gageler LL.M. ’87 was appointed to a judgeship on Australia’s High Court on Aug. 21. He joins six other judges on Australia’s most powerful court.

Of the 39 law school graduates serving as clerks to the U.S. Supreme Court justices and retired justices in the 2012-2013 term, seven hail from Harvard Law School.

Other than their Harvard Law degrees, Naomi Koshi LL.M. ’09 and Karen Freeman-Wilson ’85 don’t appear to have much in common. They live in opposite parts of the world and are different in professional background, ethnicity and age. And yet they share a certain connection. Both were recently elected the first female mayors of cities that are in the middle of their countries and are sometimes overshadowed by their neighbors. The cities are first in their hearts, however—the places where they grew up and which they want to help grow.

A diagram tracing the network of some of the HLS graduates at the top levels of the U.S. national security infrastructure in the administrations of Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama ’91.

In 2007, Joseph “Jody” LaNasa ’94 launched Serengeti Asset Management, an opportunistic hedge fund that focuses on value investments in the debt and equity of public and private companies.

Professor Emeritus Charles M. Haar ‘48, a pioneer in land-use law whose scholarship focused on laws and institutions of city planning, urban development and environmental issues, died on January 10, 2012. He was 91.

At the airport in New York one day last year, Alex Dimitrief ’85 was on a call regarding a problem that his company, faced in China. When his plane landed in London, he took a call on a different matter in Vietnam. And late that night, when he arrived in Lagos, he fielded yet another call, dealing with an issue back in the U.S. “It was an incredibly complicated day,” recalls Dimitrief, vice president and general counsel of GE Energy. And it illustrates the emerging role of today’s global general counsel.

Fasil Amdetsion ’07 has been writing about relations between Ethiopia and surrounding states since he was a student at Harvard Law School. Since last fall, he’s gone from writing about Ethiopia to working for its government.

Robert McDuff ’80 remembers clearly what first got him thinking about civil rights and the profession of law. In 1968, when he was 12, he read a newspaper account of a murder trial in his hometown of Hattiesburg, Miss. The victim was an African-American shopkeeper and civil rights leader killed by the Klan after he let other other African-Americans use his store as a place to pay their poll taxes.

Human rights lawyer Thomas Buergenthal LL.M. ’61 S.J.D. ’68, author of “A Lucky Child: A Memoir of Surviving Auschwitz as a Young Boy,” wrote that his experience as a Holocaust survivor made him a better judge. "I understood, not only intellectually but emotionally, what it is like to be victim of human rights violations. I could, after all, feel it in my bones."

Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking,” by Susan Cain ’93 (Crown). Cain has written a manifesto for a large but often marginalized subset of the population: introverts. Though numbering about one out of every three people, they nevertheless frequently remain closeted in a society that idealizes the “oppressive standard” of extroversion, she writes.

By her 2L year, Regina Fitzpatrick ’08 was dead set on working for the U.N. on a peacekeeping mission. She’d come to HLS with a master’s in human rights after a stint with the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. The U.N.’s “legitimacy and access to hot spots,” she says, made it her goal. She is now working in Juba, South Sudan, living her dream.

As an HLS student in the early 1980s, James O’Neal dreamed of combining his passions for law and education to help at-risk kids in New York City. But times were grim for lawyers interested in public interest work. The Legal Services Corporation, the primary provider of legal aid to low-income people in the United States, was in dire straits after losing much of its federal funding, and there were few other opportunities—and little support—for public service jobs. For O’Neal and others like him, the prospects were dim.