Alumni Focus

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.

On Feb. 9, following 17 months of intense negotiations, numerous late-night conference calls and not a few fractious meetings where all seemed hopeless, five of the nation's biggest mortgage lenders agreed to a historic $25 billion settlement that will provide financial relief to more than a million homeowners who were victims of improper foreclosures or other mortgage servicing abuses.

The World Trade Organization has appointed Harvard Law School alumnus and former HLS Visiting Professor of Law Seung Wha Chang LL.M. ’92 S.J.D. ’94 to serve on its seven-member Appellate Body. Chang will settle international trade disputes alongside distinguished trade experts from the U.S., the E.U., China, India, Mexico and South Africa.

Harvard Law School alumnus Richard A. Meserve ‘75, president of the Carnegie Institution for Science and former head of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, was elected president of Harvard’s Board of Overseers for the 2012-2013 academic year. Lucy Fisher, president of the independent film production company Red Wagon Entertainment will serve as vice-chair of the committee.

On April 19, Harvard Law School's American Constitution Society sponsored “A Progressive Vision of National Security,” a lecture delivered by Former Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold ’79. The only member of the Senate to vote against the PATRIOT Act in 2001 and one of 23 to vote against the Iraq war in 2002, Feingold recently authored "While America Sleeps," a book that details his criticisms of American foreign policy since 9/11 and proposes a plan to correct the nation's course.

Harvard Law School’s (HLS) alumni reunion this past weekend reconnected friends from near and far in the School’s newest addition, the 250,000-square-foot Wasserstein Hall, Caspersen Student Center, Clinical Wing Building on the campus’ northwest corner.

On April 14, 2012, lifelong Red Sox fan and Harvard Law School grad Bill Hogan, Jr. ’36 celebrated his 100th birthday by throwing out the ceremonial first pitch for the Red Sox-Rays game at Fenway Park. Hogan, born just six days before the Red Sox played their first game in Fenway, was part of the centennial celebration leading up to Fenway Park’s 100th anniversary on April 20.

Despite its “essential” cloak of secrecy, the Central Intelligence Agency is committed to the rule of law, CIA general counsel Stephen W. Preston ’83 said in a speech at Harvard Law School on Tuesday, April 12, hosted by the HLS American Constitution Society.

On April 3, Brigadier General Mark Martins ’90, chief prosecutor at the Office of U.S. Military Commissions in the Department of Defense, delivered a lecture at Harvard Law School on Legitimacy and the Limits of Command in Reformed Military Commissions. The lecture was sponsored by the National Security Journal and the National Security & Law Association.

John Payton ’77, a leading civil rights lawyer who defended the University of Michigan's affirmative action policy before the Supreme Court and led the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, died March 22, 2012. He was 65.

In early March at Harvard Law School,  Lesley Rosenthal ’89, author of the new book "Good Counsel: Meeting the Legal Needs of Nonprofits," discussed the career path that has led her to be vice president, general counsel and secretary of Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in New York City.

As part of the Defending Childhood Task Force, Harvard Law School Professor Charles Ogletree participated in a hearing on March 21 at the University of Miami School of Law, addressing the problem of children’s exposure to community violence.