Faculty Scholarship

In an article published in the April 20 Opinion section of The Wall Street Journal, Harvard Law School Professor Hal S. Scott takes a look at the overregulation of private offerings by the Securities and Exchange Commission, following a recent statement by SEC Chair Mary Schapiro that the agency is investigating ways to reduce regulatory burdens on small-business capital formation. According to Scott, this should prompt a review of the regulation of offerings in both private and public markets.

Harvard Law School Professor Annette Gordon-Reed ’84 has been elected to membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. One of 212 new members, Gordon-Reed joins leaders from academia, business, public affairs, the humanities and the arts among the ranks of the Academy.

In an April 18 op-ed published in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Harvard Law School Professor William Alford ’77 addresses how budget cutting in Congress threatens to undermine the Special Olympics—an organization whose history, according to Alford, “is one of how civil society and government working together can create results that neither could wholly attain on its own.”

The Federalist Society and the Journal of Law & Public Policy will present the Charles Fried Intellectual Diversity Award to Professor Jed Shugerman at the Federalist Society’s annual banquet on April 14th.  

Harvard Law School Dean Martha Minow, who serves on the board of directors for the Legal Services Corporation (LSC), was selected as co-chair of an LSC task force to develop additional resources to help low-income Americans facing serious civil legal problems.

Harvard Law School Professor Hal S. Scott, Director of the Committee on Capital Markets Regulation, testified before the House Agriculture Committee's Subcommittee on General Farm Commodities and Risk Management on Wednesday, April 13, 2011 at 10am. Scott warned that the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and the Securities and Exchange Commission need to make major changes in coordinating the development of new rules required under the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. The rules will be aimed at better regulating the derivatives market.

On March 31, Professor Henry Smith delivered his Chair Lecture in honor of his appointment as Fessenden Professor of Law. His lecture, entitled Equity Revisited, explored the relationship between law and equity. He examined, through the lens of economic analysis, equity as a solution to opportunism on the part of those who exploit bright-line law, with a focus on equitable maxims, defenses, and remedies.

In an open letter published recently in The New York Review of Books, Harvard Law School Professor Yochai Benkler ’94 and co-author Bruce Ackerman, professor at Yale Law School, detail the detention of Bradley Manning, a US soldier charged with providing government documents to Wikileaks, and call on President Obama and the Pentagon to document grounds for what the authors describe as “illegal and immoral” confinement.

In an Apr. 4 op-ed published in The Boston Globe’s Opinion Blog “The Angle,” Harvard Law School Dean Martha Minow and co-author John Broderick (dean and president of the University of New Hampshire School of Law) address impending Congressional budget cuts that would force programs that provide pro bono legal aid to close their doors.

At a recent lecture hosted by HLS Lambda and the Journal of Law & Technology, Harvard Law School’s Henry N. Ess Professor of Law John Palfrey discussed the latest legal and legislative attempts to address cyber-bullying—or, as Palfrey prefers to describe it, bullying in the digital era.

The following op-ed by HLS Professor Alan Dershowitz “Norway to Jews: You’re Not Welcome Here,” appeared in the March 29, 2011 edition of the Wall Street Journal. He is the author of numerous books, including “The Trials of Zion,” “The Case for Moral Clarity: Israel, Hamas and Gaza,” and “Finding, Framing, and Hanging Jefferson: A Lost Letter, a Remarkable Discovery, and Freedom of Speech in an Age of Terrorism.”

Harvard Law School Professor Noah Feldman explained aspects of Sharia and Islam Law on a television program -- "Unwelcome: The Muslims Next Door" -- for CNN's In America series.The segment, which examines a Tennessee city torn apart as residents fight to block the construction of a large Islamic center, is part of a broadcast that will air on Saturday, April 2 at 8:00 p.m.

In a recent op-ed in Slate, Professor Jack Goldsmith makes the case for why President Obama's campaign of air and sea strikes against Libya is constitutional.  Goldsmith says that while he agrees with "many of the arguments from critics of the intervention that  President Obama acted imprudently in committing American forces to a conflict with an ill-defined national security justification,"  he does not believe that the military action is unconstitutional. Goldsmith's op-ed, "War Power," appeared in the March 21, 2011 edition of Slate. A former assistant attorney general in the Bush Administration, Goldsmith is the author of "The Terror Presidency: Law and Judgement Inside the Bush Administration" (New York : W.W. Norton & Company 2007).

Harvard Law School Professor Hal Scott’s Program on International Financial Systems is hosting the 9th annual “Symposium on Building the Financial System of the Twenty-first Century: An Agenda for Europe and the United States” this weekend in Hampshire, England.  Co-hosted by the Centre for European Policy Studies, the event will gather more than 100 senior executives and government officials from the financial industry, policymaking arenas, law, and academia.  

“In his State of the Union speech last month, President Obama got one of his biggest laughs when he said that there are twelve different agencies that deal with exports, and at least five that deal with housing policy. Then there is my favorite example: the interior department is in charge of salmon while they’re in fresh water, but the commerce department handles them in saltwater. ‘I hear it gets even more complicated,’ and here he smirked, ‘once they’re smoked.’ All I could think was, this guy is stealing my chair talk!” With these words, Archibald Cox Professor of Law Jody Freeman L.L.M. ’91 introduced her lecture “Coordinating Agencies in Shared Regulatory Space,” in which she spoke about the problem of wasteful duplication in government agencies.

Harvard Law School Professor Laurence H. Tribe ’66 will receive an honorary doctorate on March 29 from Mexico’s Instituto Nacional de Ciencias Penales (INACIPE), or National Institute of Criminal Science. He will be the first American to receive the annual “honoris causa” doctorate since its inception in 1998.

On March 14, the Library Journal announced 50 new inductees to their Movers & Shakers list, including John Palfrey ’01. Movers & Shakers is a distinguished annual award given to those who are shaping the future of libraries and communities across the United States.

Harvard Law Professor Yochai Benkler ’94 has released an article detailing U.S. government and news media censorship of WikiLeaks after the organization released the Afghan War Diary, the Iraq War Logs, and U.S. State department diplomatic cables in 2010. Among his key conclusions: The government overstated and overreacted to the WikiLeaks documents, and the mainstream news media followed suit by engaging in self-censorship. Benkler argues further that there is no sound Constitutional basis for a criminal prosecution of WikiLeaks or its leader, Julian Assange.

The Uniform Law Commission has formed a new drafting committee to prepare a Uniform Act on Powers of Appointment. Robert H. Sitkoff, the John L. Gray Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, has been named as a member of the drafting committee. An expert in trusts and estates, Sitkoff serves under gubernatorial appointment as a Uniform Law Commissioner from Massachusetts.