Faculty Scholarship

Nearly a decade after Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning shared classified materials with WikiLeaks, the site’s founder, Julian Assange, was arrested in London for his role in the disclosures. The Harvard Gazette recently spoke with three faculty members, including Yochai Benkler, the Harvard Law professor who has publicly defended the disclosure as whistleblowing.

In a recent Q&A, Professor of Practice Samantha Power, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and author of the Pulitzer-prize winning 'A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide,' reflects on the tragedy in Rwanda and the lessons learned—and not learned—since.

Harvard Law School recently hosted Judge Richard Gergel, U.S. District Judge of the U. S. District Court for the District of South Carolina, for a talk on his book, "Unexampled Courage,” and a discussion with HLS professors Randall Kennedy, Kenneth Mack and Mark Tushnet.

Officials from 23 offices of state attorneys general recently met at HLS as part of the Berkman Klein Center’s AGTech Forum series, to discuss tech-driven challenges to privacy and data security that vex state regulators and threaten consumers, and to strategize on how the law can keep up.

Professor of Practice Naz Modirzadeh ’02, founding director of the Harvard Law School Program on International Law and Armed Conflict, spoke before the United Nations Security Council in New York City on April 1 on safeguarding humanitarian assistance in counterterrorism contexts.

A team of researchers from Harvard Law School, Harvard Medical School and MIT have published a new article in Science, the peer-reviewed academic journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, that suggests that medical artificial intelligence systems could be vulnerable to adversarial attacks.

A panel discussion at HLS brought together four faculty members to share their moments of reckoning, when they had to re-examine some of their most closely held ideas.

William P. Alford ’77, the Jerome A. and Joan L. Cohen Professor of East Asian Legal Studies at Harvard Law School, has received the Li Buyun Law Prize from the Shanghai Institute of Finance and Law, a leading Chinese academic society.

Alan Jenkins ’89, president and co-founder of The Opportunity Agenda, a social justice communications organization, will join the Harvard Law School faculty as a professor of practice in July.

As part of its regular Book Talk series, the Harvard Law School Library recently hosted Robert Walmsley University Professor Cass Sunstein for a discussion of his latest release, "On Freedom."

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.