Faculty Scholarship

On February 13, the Harvard Law School Library hosted Prof. Susan Crawford for a book talk and discussion on her newly-released title, "Fiber: The Coming Tech Revolution—and Why America Might Miss It."

Harvard Law Professor Jesse Fried ’92 first became interested in the use and misuse of repurchases as an Olin Fellow at HLS in the mid-1990s. He has recently co-written several articles on the topic, including “Are Buybacks Really Shortchanging Investment?” with Charles C.Y. Wang in the Harvard Business Review. Here, Fried offers perspective on a complex, and increasingly political, topic.

Does President Donald Trump have the legal authority to declare a national emergency, and order the military to build a wall between Mexico and the United States? Does he have the constitutional authority to spend money on a wall that Congress hasn’t specifically allocated? Over the past several weeks, HLS scholars have weighed in on the matter.

Europe’s crisis—the challenges to liberal democracy across the continent, the rise of right-wing nationalist parties, the backlash against the European Union—isn’t a rebellion of economic have-nots, according to former HLS professor Joseph Weiler, who delivered the Herbert W. Vaughan Memorial Lecture, “The European Culture War 2003-2019,” on Feb. 6.

With the increased use of a massive volume and variety of data in our lives, our health care will inevitably be affected, note the editors of a new collection, one of the recent faculty books captured in this section.

Five new lawyer-scholars at Harvard Law School are already influencing the national conversation on our criminal law system.

As staff attorney with the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia for more than three years, Assistant Professor Andrew Manuel Crespo '08 represented adults and juveniles charged with felonies ranging from armed robberies to homicides. Passionate about the work, he had no plans to become an academic. But early in his career, then-Dean Martha Minow engaged him in a life-changing conversation.

Assistant Professor Crystal Yang ’13, who joined the HLS faculty in 2014, brings an empirical focus to the study of criminal law. Yang, who holds a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard, has in the past focused her empirical studies on criminal sentencing. She has now turned her attention to the extensive use of cash bail and pretrial detention in the U.S., in order to understand their short- and long-term consequences.

"I think criminal procedure is a very fundamental part of the constitutional law of democracy,” says Assistant Professor Daphna Renan, who writes about structural constitutional law, administrative law, and the Fourth Amendment. “When can the government use force against its own citizens? When can it search individuals, communities and communications? How do emergent technologies challenge existing legal frameworks? For anyone who cares about power and how law constrains and enables it, there are no more pressing questions than these.”

There are more than 2 million people imprisoned in the U.S. today. One hundred years from now, historians are likely to be fascinated by this carceral state: How did we get here? Are there better options for society? Some of the answers—or, at least, possible alternatives—may lie in an examination of medieval England. As a Harvard undergrad, Assistant Professor Elizabeth Papp Kamali ’07 fell in love with medieval legal history. After graduating from HLS, she got her Ph.D. in history at the University of Michigan, then joined the HLS faculty in 2015.

Assistant Professor Anna Lvovsky '13, who joined the HLS faculty in 2017, always planned to teach. A legal historian - she holds a Ph.D. from Harvard - with a focus on the administration of criminal justice, she teaches a seminar on the history of policing in the U.S. as well as courses on evidence and criminal law that invite students to focus on the systemic effects of seemingly neutral legal rules.

Harvard Law Professor Hal S. Scott was in his element, thundering up and down the aisles of a classroom in Wasserstein Hall and challenging each of his 70 Capital Markets Regulation students to match his enthusiasm and curiosity. After 43 years on the HLS faculty, Scott taught his final class at the school before retiring last spring. What is the best process, he asked, for ensuring that regulations for the financial system achieve their intended effect?

The American Academy of Political and Social Science (AAPSS) has announced that Ambassador Samantha Power '99, diplomat, academic, and human rights advocate, will receive the 2019 Daniel Patrick Moynihan Prize in Social Science and Public Policy.

Statistics released by the Social Science Research Network (SSRN) indicate that, as of the end of 2018, Harvard Law School faculty members have continued to feature prominently on SSRN’s list of the 100 most-cited law professors.

President Trump may be able to build a wall along the Mexican border, Harvard analysts say, but then the ripples will widen.

Christine Desan, the Leo Gottlieb Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, organized the conference, “Money as a Democratic Medium,” a two-day event that challenged its participants to re-examine the history of money in America, and to redefine its future.

Harvard researchers—including HLS Professor and Petrie-Flom Center Faculty Director Glenn Cohen—and others share their views on key issues in the field.

The Investor Responsibility Research Center Institute awarded its 2018 investor research prize to a study by Harvard Law School Professor Lucian Bebchuk LL.M. ’80 S.J.D. ’84, that examines the resources and decisions of index fund managers.

Two Harvard efforts, including Professor Susan Crawford's Autonomous Vehicles and Local Government Lab, are helping cities and towns craft AV policies while the technology is still emerging.

Professor William Alford ’77 delivered a chair lecture on the occasion of his appointment as the inaugural Jerome A. and Joan L. Cohen Professor of East Asian Legal Studies at Harvard Law School.

A six-year-long study by Harvard Law School's Access to Justice Lab (A2J Lab) evaluated and analyzed the effectiveness of pro bono representation in divorce cases in Philadelphia County. The recently released study found that people who received legal representation were 87% more likely to achieve a divorce than people without it.