Faculty Scholarship

Cass Sunstein ’78, Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law and director of HLS’s new Program on Behavioral Economics and Public Policy, has been named a University Professor, Harvard University President Drew Faust announced today. Harvard’s highest honor for a faculty member, University Professorships were established in 1935 to recognize individuals whose work on the frontiers of knowledge crosses the traditional boundaries of academic disciplines.

On Feb. 12, Harvard Law School Professor Laurence Tribe ’66, a constitutional law scholar, participated in a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing titled “Proposals to Reduce Gun Violence: Protecting Our Communities While Respecting the Second Amendment.”

Daniel J. Meltzer ’75, the Story professor of law at Harvard Law School, has been appointed as the next Director of the American Law Institute (ALI). The ALI announced the appointment on January 18, 2013.

The Securities and Exchange Commission recently indicated in an entry in the Office of Management and Budget’s Unified Agenda that it plans to issue by April 2013 a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking on requiring public companies to disclose their spending on politics. The adoption of such a rule was urged in a rulemaking petition submitted by a committee of ten law professors co-chaired by Harvard Law School Professor Lucian Bebchuk LL.M. ’80 S.J.D. ’84 and by a record number of supporting comments subsequently filed with the SEC.

In recent weeks, a number of HLS faculty have weighed in on issues surrounding the fiscal cliff negotiations.

An article written by Harvard Law School Professor Charles Fried was named an exemplar of good legal writing by The Green Bag, a quarterly journal devoted to readable, concise, and entertaining legal scholarship. A number of Harvard Law School alumni were also included on Green Bag’s 2012 list of “Exemplary Legal Writing.” Their work will appear in the “2013 Almanac & Reader.”

Daniel Shapiro, an affiliated faculty member with the Harvard Law School Program on Negotiation, recently wrote an opinion piece on "Negotiating the Fiscal Crisis." Shapiro is an assistant professor of psychology at Harvard Medical School/McLean Hospital, founder and director of the Harvard International Negotiation Program, and co-author of "Beyond Reason: Using Emotions as You Negotiate."

The National Asian Pacific American Bar Association (NAPABA) has named Professor Jeannie Suk ’02 among the 2012 recipients of the association’s “Best Lawyers Under 40” awards.

The highly connected nature of today’s world has all sorts of benefits—but all sorts of potential costs as well, from loss of control of private data to a world financial system so intertwined that when one part of it falls, it’s hard to keep other parts from toppling along with it. In “Interop: The Promise and Perils of Highly Interconnected Systems,” John Palfrey ’01 and Urs Gasser LL.M. ’03 draw on their work at the HLS Berkman Center for Internet & Society to start developing a “normative theory identifying what we want out of all this connectivity.”

Nancy Gertner's two decades as a defense attorney in Boston as a self-described “revolutionary” and “radical lawyer” redoubled her belief in the inherent unfairness of many aspects of the criminal justice system, including its disparate impact on racial minorities. As she relates in her new book, it also laid the groundwork for her federal judgeship.

Harvard Law School Professor Jonathan Zittrain has been named among the 100 Foreign Policy Global Thinkers for 2012.

In a recent review essay for the online journal Jotwell, Harvard Law School Professor Adrian Vermeule ’93 takes a look at Norton E. Long’s article “Bureaucracy and Constitutionalism,” published in 1952 in the American Political Science Review.

“Medical tourism—the travel of patients who are residents of one country (the ‘home country’) to another country for medical treatment (the ‘destination country’)—represents a growing and important business," writes Assistant Professor I. Glenn Cohen ’03 in a recent article.

Thirty-five years ago, after majoring in mathematics at Harvard and receiving a Ph.D. in the same subject from MIT, HLS Professor Gerald Neuman ’80 switched from the field of math to the field of law—from “truth to justice,” he said in an interview in his office in Griswold Hall. That decision has led to a career of teaching and writing on international human rights law and comparative constitutional law, and to his election last fall to the U.N.’s Human Rights Committee, a body of 18 independent experts who assess and critique countries’ records on civil and political rights.

At a time when Americans are expressing record dissatisfaction with Washington, the publication this fall of Professor Lawrence Lessig’s latest book couldn’t be more opportune. “Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress—and a Plan to Stop It” (Twelve) is an exhaustively researched and passionately argued indictment of Capitol Hill and the money-centered daily dance between lawmakers and lobbyists.

Professor Robert Mnookin ’68, chairman of the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School, was honored by the International Academy of Mediators with a lifetime achievement award. The IAM Award is presented to a person who has made exceptional contributions throughout his or her career by personally advancing alternative dispute resolution and inspiring others to do so.

HLS Dean Martha Minow received the Gold Medal for Outstanding Contribution to Public Discourse from the College Historical Society of Trinity College, Dublin at a ceremony on Nov. 13, 2012. The College Historical Society, popularly referred to as “The Hist,” is one of the world’s oldest undergraduate debating societies, established in 1770.

Michael Klarman’s scholarship has focused on the effect that court rulings have on social reform movements. He argues that when courts get ahead of public opinion, political backlash often follows. That’s what he found in an earlier book he wrote on race and the U.S. Supreme Court, and it is a phenomenon he has also observed in cases involving the death penalty and abortion. In his new book, “From the Closet to the Altar: Courts, Backlash, and the Struggle for Same-Sex Marriage,” the HLS professor explores whether the same effect has taken place when it comes to same-sex marriage litigation.

Harvard Law School Professor and Democratic nominee Elizabeth Warren—bankruptcy expert, Wall Street reformer and consumer watch dog—has won a hard-fought race for the U.S. Senate against her Republican opponent, incumbent Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown.