Faculty Scholarship

Harvard Law School Professor Benjamin Sachs, a labor law specialist who focuses on unions in politics, sat down with a reporter for the HLS News office to reflect on the Supreme Court's increased involvement in labor cases and the state of labor law today.

A number of Harvard Law School faculty and alumni were included on Green Bag’s 2013 list of “Exemplary Legal Writing.” The list was compiled from nominees based on the votes of the journal’s Board of Advisers, which includes members of the state and federal judiciaries, private law firms, the news media and academia.

This summer, when Chelsea Manning (then known as Private Bradley Manning) was on trial for passing hundreds of thousands of documents obtained from military computers to WikiLeaks, Harvard Law Professor Yochai Benkler ’94 testified for the defense. Benkler’s work—including his 2011 case study of the legal wrangling related to WikiLeaks—has put him in the middle of the debate over the balance between civil liberties and security in a post-9/11 networked world.

“The New Black: What Has Changed—and What Has Not—with Race in America,” edited by Professor Kenneth W. Mack ’91 and Guy-Uriel Charles (New Press). The volume presents essays that consider questions that look beyond the main focus of the civil rights era: to lessen inequality between black people and white people. The contributors, including HLS Professor Lani Guinier, write on topics ranging from group identity to anti-discrimination law to implicit racial biases, revealing often overlooked issues of race and justice in a supposed post-racial society.

Randall Kennedy has tackled plenty of controversial issues in his five previous books, ranging from interracial marriage to the intersection of race, crime and the law. The Harvard Law professor comes to the defense of affirmative action in his latest book, “For Discrimination.” In an interview with the Bulletin, Kennedy described his own evolution on the issue and the impact of the Supreme Court’s ruling in Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin, which was announced after his book went to print.

Louis Kaplow ’81 seeks to upend the academic debate and to suggest important reforms to legal practice in his latest book, which addresses the law and economics of price fixing. The Harvard Law School professor describes the law prohibiting this practice as “incoherent, its practical reach uncertain, and its fit with fundamental economic principles obscure.” And that’s just in the first paragraph.

However much presidents want to influence the future through their judicial appointments, the problem, Professor Mark Tushnet writes in his new book, “In the Balance: Law and Politics on the Roberts Court” (Norton, 2013), “is that things change.”

The Trauma and Learning Policy Initiative, a nationally recognized collaboration between Harvard Law School and Massachusetts Advocates for Children (MAC), recently published the second volume of its landmark report “Helping Traumatized Children Learn” which offers a guide to a process for creating trauma-sensitive schools and a policy agenda to provide the support schools need to achieve that goal.

The Internet Monitor project at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University recently released its first annual report, “Internet Monitor 2013: Reflections on the Digital World.” The project evaluates, describes, and summarizes the means, mechanisms, and extent of Internet content controls and Internet activity around the world.

In many areas of law, excuses can defeat liability. Criminal law recognizes duress or provocation as excuses to reduce a criminal defendant’s punishment. In Contracts,…

The Harvard Gazette recently spoke with Harvard Law School Professor Mark Tushnet about two upcoming challenges to the Affordable Care Act involving for-profit companies that object on religious grounds to providing contraceptive coverage to their employees.

On Oct. 23, Professor Kenneth Mack ‘91 delivered a lecture at the Supreme Court as part of the Supreme Court Historical Society’s 2013 Leon Silverman Lecture Series. This year’s theme was “Litigants in landmark Supreme Court cases of the 20th century.”

Harvard Law School Professor John C. Coates spoke at a briefing on Oct. 30 in Washington, D.C., to urge the Securities and Exchange Commission…

Q&A with Margaret Marshall, who wrote the landmark state ruling allowing gays to wed On Nov. 18, 2003, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court published its…

Harvard Law School Professor Vicki Jackson marked her appointment to the Thurgood Marshall Professorship of Constitutional Law with an Oct. 3 lecture titled “Proportionality…

Harvard Law School Professor Alan M. Dershowitz is retiring at the conclusion of the fall semester, and on Oct. 7 the school hosted a…

After five decades as one of the most visible and vocal presences at Harvard Law School, Alan M. Dershowitz is in his final semester of teaching and will relinquish his chair at the end of the academic year.

Harvard Law School Professor David J. Barron '94, an expert in administrative law and the separation of powers, was nominated to the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit by President Barack Obama '91 on Tuesday.

To commemorate the signing of the U.S. Constitution, Harvard Law School Professor Michael Klarman, an expert on constitutional law and constitutional history, gave a lecture at Harvard Law School on Tuesday, Sept. 17. His talk, titled “Not Written in Stone,” focused on the reasons he believes the U.S. Constitution should not be given undue reverence.