Faculty Scholarship

Harvard Law School Professor of Practice Nancy Gertner has been selected as a recipient of the 2014 Margaret Brent Women Lawyers of Achievement Award, established by the ABA Commission on the Status of Women in the Profession.

Three Harvard Law professors and a Harvard Law alum recently participated in debates on Intelligence Squared, a public policy debate series airing on PBS.

More than 100 years after the U.S. Supreme Court decided a series of cases that left citizens of territories including Puerto Rico, Guam and the American Samoa with only limited Constitutional rights, Harvard Law School hosted a conference to reconsider the so-called Insular Cases and the resonance they continue to hold today.

Harvard Law School Dean Martha Minow gave the Third Annual Reconciliation Lecture at the University of the Free State in South Africa on Feb. 24. The speech, titled “Forgiveness, Law and Justice,” focused on forgiveness of people, societies and nations and the role the law plays in helping reconciliation after a wrongdoing.

Samuel Moyn '01, a leading historian and prize-winning author, will join the faculty of Harvard Law School starting July 1, 2014 as professor of law. Moyn currently serves as James Bryce Professor of European Legal History in the Columbia University history department.

Harvard Law School Professor Elizabeth Bartholet received an award from the National Human Rights Committee of Qatar, in Doha, on Jan. 8, 2014. The award was presented by Sultan Hassan al Jamali, assistant secretary general of the National Human Rights Committee of Qatar.

34 Harvard Law School faculty members and 24 faculty from Boston College Law School have signed a letter urging the U.S. Congress to support the core principles in the pending legislation known as CHIFF (Children in Families First), S. 1530 and H.R. 3323.

How best to assist people in financial trouble is the focus of the Consumer Financial Distress Project, a groundbreaking new study designed and led by Harvard Law School Professor Jim Greiner, Professor Dalié Jiménez at the University of Connecticut School of Law, and Professor Lois Lupica at the University of Maine School of Law.

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,…