Faculty Scholarship

According to Harvard Law School lecturer Jonathan Lovvorn, saving the planet and its inhabitants from climate catastrophe begins with the world’s most vulnerable population: animals.

When Myanmar’s military junta tightened its grip in the late ’80s to quash a nationwide democracy movement, Yee Htun fled the brutal crackdown on dissent along with her mother, a doctor turned human rights activist, and three siblings. After five years in a refugee camp in Thailand, they immigrated to Canada as government-sponsored refugees, unsure of when they might return home.

J. Mark Ramseyer, Mitsubishi Professor of Japanese Legal Studies at the Harvard Law School, has been conferred the Order of the Rising Sun, Gold Rays with Neck Ribbon, from the Japanese government. One of the oldest and highest national decorations, this award recognizes his extensive contributions to the development of Japanese studies in the U.S.

A new book from researchers at the Berkman Klein Center, with its origins in a 3-year study of the media ecosystem surrounding the 2016 U.S. presidential election, disrupts the traditional narrative—invoking "fake news,” Russian interference, data breaches and social media—around what contributed to the divisive outcome.

At a recent Harvard Law School Library Book Talk, Catharine A. MacKinnon, a pioneer of legal theory and practice and an activist for women’s rights, discussed her latest book "Butterfly Politics," in which she argues that seemingly minor interventions in the legal realm can have a butterfly effect that generates major social and cultural transformations.

During the introduction to the book launch event for “Big Data, Health Law, and Bioethics,” one of the editors, Harvard Law School Professor I. Glenn Cohen ’03, faculty director of the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics, told a story about how powerful – and perhaps foreboding – big data can be.

On Sept. 17, the Harvard Law School Project on Disability (HPOD) will commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Special Olympics with Timothy Shriver, Special Olympics International Board Chairman.

On Google’s main campus in Mountain View, Calif., Harvard Law School's Center on the Legal Profession convened more than 80 innovation leaders from around the world—half from law firms and half from in-house legal departments—in June, for a series of in-depth workshops around how their organizations operationalize innovation.

A letter drafted by HLS's Emmett Environmental Law and Policy Clinic Director Wendy Jacobs, and signed by nearly 100 hospital leaders and Harvard faculty, calls on the Environmental Protection Agency to withdraw its proposed rule on scientific “transparency,” saying that the change would drastically limit the scientific and medical knowledge that underlie a host of EPA regulations that protect human health.

The founder and director of Harvard Immigration and Refugee Clinic Deborah Anker LL.M. ’84 received the Federal Bar Association’s NGO Lawyer of the Year Joint Award on May 18. She was honored alongside Karen Musalo, director of the Center for Gender and Refugee Studies at Hastings College of the Law.

The American Law Institute has elected John Manning ’85, Harvard Law School Morgan and Helen Chu Dean and Professor of Law, as a member. Manning and four Harvard Law School graduates were five of 34 new members elected this year.

Rachel A. Viscomi ’01 has been appointed assistant clinical professor of law at Harvard Law School and named director of the Harvard Negotiation and Mediation Clinical Program. She was formerly a lecturer on law at HLS and the acting director of HNMCP.

To gain a better understanding of some of the issues increasingly in play in today's political climate, the Gazette interviewed Mark Tushnet, Michael Klarman, Steven Levitsky, and Steven Jarding--Harvard faculty members who have expertise in constitutional law and legal history, democratic and authoritarian governments, and American politics.

Harvard Law School Professor Roberto Unger has been elected to the British Academy for the humanities and social sciences in recognition of his work in the fields of social theory, politics and law. Unger was one of 76 distinguished scholars to be elected to the fellowship this year.

Cass Sunstein ’78, the Robert Walmsley University Professor at Harvard University and renowned legal scholar and behavioral economist, received the prestigious Holberg Prize at the University of Bergen, Norway, on June 6.

HLS Professor Mnookin, who for many years chaired the school’s Program on Negotiation, joins two other Harvard-affiliated professors in a study of the former secretary of state’s public and private deal-making, based on extensive interviews with Henry Kissinger on negotiation strategy and tactics.

"It Can't Happen Here," the novel by Sinclair Lewis written in the 1930s as fascism was rising in Europe, imagines an America overtaken by an authoritarian regime. The new book edited by Harvard Law Professor Cass Sunstein ’78, "Can It Happen Here?: Authoritarianism in America" (Dey Street Books), does not predict the same fate. Yet the contributors—several also affiliated with Harvard Law—take seriously the possibility that it could happen here, despite the safeguards built into the American system of government.

Professor Noah Feldman is the first to admit that James Madison will probably never merit a hip-hop Broadway musical like his partner in Constitution drafting turned bitter political foe.

‘Crimmigration’—the intersection of criminal and immigration law—is the newest policy area for the Harvard Immigration and Refugee Clinical Program (HIRC). In addition to its broader advocacy clinic, HIRC offers Phil Torrey’s crimmigration clinic in the spring: an opportunity for students to gain direct experience working on and contributing to case law in this young field.

Renowned human rights expert Martha Minow, the Carter Professor of General Jurisprudence at Harvard Law School and a Harvard University Distinguished Service Professor, has been named a University Professor, Harvard’s highest faculty honor. Minow, who was dean of Harvard Law School from 2009 to 2017, will begin her appointment on July 1.

Cass Sunstein ’78, the Robert Walmsley University Professor at Harvard University and renowned legal scholar and behavioral economist, received the prestigious Holberg Prize at the University of Bergen, Norway, on June 6.