Faculty Scholarship

When Lawrence Lessig ended his issue-oriented quest for the Democratic Party’s nomination in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, he vowed to continue his campaign to reform election finance practices and reduce the influence of money in politics.

Larry Schwartztol, executive director of Harvard Law School’s Criminal Justice Program of Study, Research and Advocacy, recently spoke with the Harvard Gazette about the HLS program, his role in it, and a conference sponsored by the new initiative on how the media helps shape the criminal justice narrative.

Yochai Benkler, who has written extensively on the “networked public sphere,” including his influential book “The Wealth of Networks,” recently spoke about his proposal for a defense of whistleblowers, his testimony in a trial of a well-known leaker of military documents, and a problem he calls a growing crisis in the country.

As the U.S. Supreme Court term has gotten underway, Harvard Law School faculty have submitted amicus briefs in upcoming cases involving congressional redistricting and affirmative action in college admissions.

The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation has awarded $425,000 over two years for the development of SHARIAsource—an online Islamic law resource founded and directed by Harvard Law School Professor Intisar Rabb.

Brandeis University has selected Harvard Law School Dean Martha Minow as the winner of the 2015-16 Joseph B. and Toby Gittler Prize, presented annually to a person whose body of published work reflects scholarly excellence and makes a lasting contribution to racial, ethnic or religious relations.

The recent digitization of the Simon Greenleaf papers offers glimpses of the 19th century HLS professor who viewed the law as a fusion of scientific thought and moral experience.

Property law expert Joseph Singer argues that regulations make markets and property possible and promotes conservatives values. Regulations are needed to protect us from harm and fraudulent actions by others, to ensure that people can acquire property, and to allow all of us to exercise equal freedoms, he writes

For a deep, detailed, compellingly written, unstintingly transparent view of Harvard Law School as it was from the fall of 1817 (six students) to the spring of 1910 (765 students), look to “On the Battlefield of Merit”—the first of two volumes intended to mark the school’s bicentennial in 2017.

Corporate governance scholars at Harvard Law keep putting up great numbers.

In January 2010, Martha Minow, then the new dean of Harvard Law School, taught a seminar examining the Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court. Bolstering that effort was her co-teacher, Alex Whiting, who later that year would begin a three-year tenure at the ICC, managing first investigations and then prosecutions for the office. The other co-teacher was the ICC’s first chief prosecutor, Luis Moreno-Ocampo.

Dan Meltzer was my favorite teacher in law school, and he remains the person I most want to be when I grow up. But I must confess that his class was often one of my more stressful experiences at Harvard. Not because Dan was mean or overbearing—quite the opposite. What stressed us out was that we loved Dan from the first day, and nobody wanted to let him down.

Doctors who provide medical assistance to people labeled terrorists are increasingly vulnerable to prosecution in the United States and other Western democracies, according to a law briefing by the Harvard Law School Program on International Law and Armed Conflict (PILAC).

Harvard Law School Professor Jacob Gersen believes the ever-growing interest in food law is here to stay—and that it, like environmental law and administrative law before it, will eventually go from course-catalog novelty to staple.

Elizabeth Bartholet '65, renowned child welfare advocate and founding faculty director of Harvard Law School’s Child Advocacy Program, has been at the center of many public conversations following the discovery of the child, once known as Baby Doe, but since identified as Bella Bond.

A study on capital punishment co-authored by Harvard Law School Professor Carol Steiker ’86 and her brother Jordan Steiker ’88 a professor at the University of Texas School of Law, was influential in Connecticut’s recent decision to abolish the death penalty in that state.

Mark Wu, assistant professor of law at HLS, recently sat down to talk about his scholarship, which focuses on the rapidly changing world of international trade and international law, and to offer some comments about the future of the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

According to Professor Charles Donahue, the best-known innovation in legal academia— the case method of legal teaching—may have had an early precursor dating all the way back to the 13th century.

During a recent conversation, Professor Kristen Stilt, co-director of the Islamic Legal Studies Program at Harvard Law School, spoke about the connection between animal law and Islamic law, and the impact of animal law on both animals and people.

Harvard Law School Professor John C.P. Goldberg, an expert in tort law, tort theory, and political philosophy, recently discussed some of the work that he’s done at HLS as well as a forthcoming book on torts that he is co-authoring with Fordham Law School Professor Benjamin C. Zipursky.