Faculty Scholarship

“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.

Professor John G. Palfrey ’01 was declared the winner of an interactive online debate on Internet democracy, hosted by The Economist from Feb. 23 to March 4.

Harvard Law School Professor Jonathan Zittrain appeared on the Mar. 9 edition of American Public Media’s Marketplace Tech Report to discuss the Cybersecurity and Internet Freedom Act of 2011, introduced last year by Senators Joe Lieberman, Susan Collins, and Thomas Carper.

Harvard Law School Professor Annette Gordon-Reed ’84 was recently appointed to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences’ newly-established Commission on the Humanities and Social Sciences, a national commission charged with bolstering teaching and research in the humanities and social sciences. Harvard University President Drew Gilpin Faust will also take part in the initiative.

On February 22, HLS Beneficial Professor of Law Charles Fried joined more than 10 former elected officials in an amici curiae brief filed in support of the respondents in McComish v. Bennett, now pending before the U.S. Supreme Court.

Where should the line be drawn on executive power? Harvard Law School Professor Adrian Vermeule ’93 and University of Chicago Law Professor Eric A. Posner ’91 examine the current state and the future of the U.S. presidency and Constitution through the context of historical authorities in their new book, “The Executive Unbound: After the Madisonian Republic” (Oxford University Press, 2011).

Shareholders could reduce the toxicity of corporate boards’ use of a “poison pill”—a device designed to block shareholders from considering a takeover bid—if they could replace board majorities more quickly, writes Harvard Law School Professor Lucian Bebchuk LL.M. ’80 S.J.D. ’84 in an op-ed that appeared in the Feb. 24, 2011, edition of the Wall Street Journal.

The article “Revising Egypt’s Constitution: A Contribution to the Constitutional Amendment Debate” was published by the Harvard International Law Journal on Feb. 22, written by Harvard Law School Visiting Professor Chibli Mallat with co-authors Maria van Wagenberg ’11, Mostafa Abdelkarim ’11 and Harvard Kennedy School student Julian Simcock.

Harvard Law School Dean and Jeremiah Smith, Jr. Professor of Law Martha L. Minow delivered the annual Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg Distinguished Lecture on Women and the Law, sponsored by the New York City Bar Association, on February 7. The title of the talk was “Gender and the Law Stories: Learning from Longstanding Debates.”

Harvard Law School Professor David B. Wilkins will receive the Outstanding Scholar Award from The Fellows of the American Bar Foundation. The award is given annually to a member of the academy who has engaged in outstanding scholarship in the law or in government.

Yesterday, the Senate Judiciary Committee chaired a hearing on the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act and the provision that requires, beginning in 2014, every American to maintain health insurance coverage. The law requires all citizens without work-based insurance to purchase plans in the private market.

This week, HLS Professors John G. Palfrey, Jonathan Zittrain, and HLS Climenko Fellow and Lecturer on Law Andrew K. Woods each weighed in on the Egyptian government's recent decision to block Internet access to prevent the use of social media outlets in light of escalating protests in the country. 

In a Jan. 26 review in The New Republic, HLS Professor Adrian Vermeule ’93 examines the book “Honeybee Democracy” by Thomas D. Seeley, which explores group decision-making behavior in apian colonies, and he presents his assessment of its relationship to collective wisdom and decision-making in human societies.

This week, HLS Professors John G. Palfrey, Jonathan Zittrain, and HLS Climenko Fellow and Lecturer on Law Andrew K. Woods each weighed in on the Egyptian government's recent decision to block Internet access to prevent the use of social media outlets in light of escalating protests in the country.

In a Jan. 31 article in the Opinion section of the New York Daily News online, HLS Professor John G. Palfrey addresses the issue of corporate responsibility in the wake of the Egyptian government’s recent Internet access lockdown to prevent protesters from organizing against President Hosni Mubarak’s regime.