Alumni Focus

Why I Left Harvard Law School . . . and Why I Came Back Again

While many young people disdain the political process, some recent HLS alumni seek elective office to help their communities

Five years ago, Jennifer Granholm '87 was a political unknown. Now she is working nonstop on the campaign trail to get people to know her, believe in her, and make her the next governor of Michigan.

Known for her tart tongue and her tears (when she announced that she wouldn't run for president in 1988), Patricia Schroeder knew how to get things done in Congress, including the passage of the Family and Medical Leave Act.

When he was an HLS student, Michael Dukakis ran for his first office and was elected a member of the Brookline, Mass., Town Meeting.

Once a reliable Midwestern Republican, John Anderson changed his views and then changed the dynamics of modern presidential races with his third-party candidacy in 1980.

Caspar Weinberger is, in many ways, the modern-day author of the Art of War.

They say you can be anything you want with a Harvard Law degree.

Trying to guilt trip a burglar when you catch him red-handed in your apartment is not a good idea, says Kathleen Tarr '95, especially if you're half naked.

When the World Wide Web first reached buzzword status in the mid-1990s, corporate presence on the Internet was comparatively small.

The new battle against fast food has found an important ally in Richard Daynard '67, president of the Tobacco Control Resource Center at Northeastern University School of Law.

Former Harvard Law student John Bickford still hangs around his family home, though the Hillsborough, N.H., farmhouse where he grew up is now a bed-and-breakfast, his parents are dead--and so is he.

Jamienne Studley '75 has been trying to change academic institutions for a long time. Now, as head of Skidmore College, she's finally getting paid to do it.

It wasn't long before newly elected Judge Karen Freeman-Wilson '85 began to know the defendants by their first names--they just kept coming back to her Gary, Ind., courtroom.

War has a way of finding Jim Haynes '83. Just six months after President George Bush appointed him general counsel of the Army in 1990, Iraqi President Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, sparking the Persian Gulf War.

Amnesty International still fights torture, arbitrary detention, and unfair trials, says Secretary General Irene Khan LL.M. '79, but now it's also taking on hunger, illiteracy, and discrimination.

It took Weldon Rougeau '72 only 90 seconds to get himself expelled from college.

In 30 years of practicing law, corporate bankruptcy attorney David Erne '68 had been in many negotiations--but none like this one.

When Robert "Steve" Miller Jr. '66 got a call from Bethlehem Steel's board last year asking him to assume the flagging company's reins as chairman and CEO, he accepted in a matter of hours.

Years before Enron's collapse spotlighted the vulnerability of employee retirement savings, Karen Ferguson '65 was immersed in what she half-jokingly refers to as the "arcane" area of pension law.