Faculty Scholarship

Professor Philip Heymann ’60 and Associate Professor Gabriella Blum LL.M. ’01 S.J.D. ’03 received the 2010 Chicago-Kent College of Law/Roy C. Palmer Civil Liberties Prize for their recently published book “Laws, Outlaws, and Terrorists” (MIT Press, 2010).

The American government should display more transparency and give clearer legal guidelines for targeted killings and the use of drones in Afghanistan and Pakistan, said Philip Alston, a visiting professor at Harvard Law School, during a lecture last week.

In a recent interview with the Harvard Gazette, Harvard Law School Dean Martha Minow and Professor Noah Feldman surveyed the future of the Supreme Court in light of the succession of retired associate justice John Paul Stevens by former HLS Dean Elena Kagan ’86.

I. Glenn Cohen, co-director of the Petrie-Flom Center for Health and Law Policy and assistant professor of Harvard Law School, was a guest on the radio program “The Takeaway,” a national morning news program produced in partnership with The New York Times, the BBC World Service, WNYC, Public Radio International and WGBH Boston.

The Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA), in collaboration with the Cities Programme of the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), has announced the winner of the fourth international competition to give the James Stirling Memorial Lectures on the City. The jury selected Harvard Law School Professor Gerald Frug as the 2010-2011 Stirling Lecturer, for his project entitled "The Architecture of Governance."

In an opinion piece in the Room for Debate section of The New York Times, Harvard Law School Professor John Palfrey discusses whether the death of Tyler Clementi, a Rutgers student, calls for tougher laws against malicious acts online.

The Committee on Capital Markets Regulation, an independent and nonpartisan research organization dedicated to improving the regulation and enhancing the competitiveness of U.S. capital markets, released data confirming that the competitiveness of U.S. public equity markets in global markets has resumed its deterioration throughout this year’s first half.  

In an op-ed for Project Syndicate, Harvard Law School Professor Lucian Bebchuk raises questions about the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which grants corporations greater leeway in political spending.

Philosophy must engage the issues of its day, says Suffolk University Professor Gregory Fried, co-author with his father, Harvard Law Professor Charles Fried, of the new book “Because It Is Wrong: Torture, Privacy, and Presidential Power in the Age of Terror “(Norton 2010).

Harvard Law School Professor Jack Goldsmith recently spoke on NPR about the potential consequences of the ambiguity surrounding legal and ethical limits of state behavior in cyberspace.

“Because It Is Wrong: Torture, Privacy and Presidential Power in the Age of Terror” (Norton, 2010) by father-and-son authors Charles Fried and Gregory Fried, explores three issues presented by Bush administration policies, primarily from ethical but also from historical and legal perspectives: torture; eavesdropping, surveillance and the right to privacy; and executive prerogative.

Annette Gordon-Reed ’84, an award-winning historian, is one of 23 recipients of the 2010 MacArthur Fellowship, more commonly known as the MacArthur “Genius Award.” Gordon-Reed—the recipient of the National Humanities Medal, the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award—was recognized for dramatically changing the course of Jeffersonian scholarship.

The Commodities Future Trading Commission and the Securities Exchange Commission should closely consult the Federal Reserve on conflicts of interests affecting the nation's over-the-counter derivatives clearinghouses, wrote HLS Professor Hal Scott, director of the Committee on Capital Markets Regulation, in a letter to the chairman of the CFTC. 

In Christian Legal Society v. Martinez, the Supreme Court ruled 5-to-4 last June that a public law school did not violate the First Amendment by withdrawing recognition from a Christian student group that excluded gay students. On Sept. 8, the Harvard Federalist Society sponsored a discussion of Martinez and its implications for religious freedom.

Nine years after Sept. 11 and 20 months into the Obama presidency, our nation is still flummoxed about what to do with captured terrorists, writes HLS Professor Jack Goldsmith in an op-ed in today's Washington Post. In his op-ed, "A way past the terrorist detention gridlock," Goldsmith says that while there is no "silver bullet" for this problem, there are several steps the administration could take toward resolution. 

Harvard Law School Professor Gerald Neuman ’80 has been elected to the Human Rights Committee, the premier treaty body in the UN human rights system. The committee monitors compliance by 166 states parties with their obligations under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which is part of the “International Bill of Rights.”

Time Warner Cable recently announced that it has released five essays on the future of digital communications, policy and technical perspectives based on its Research Program on Digital Communications. One of the five was written by Harvard Law School Professor John Palfrey, who contributed an essay entitled "The Challenge of Developing Effective Public Policy on the Use of Social Media by Youth."

In his recent Wall Street Journal op-ed and subsequent appearance on the radio program 'The Takeaway,'  Harvard Law School Professor Noah Feldman discussed the Obama administration's pledge to withdraw troops from Iraq by Oct 2011. He argued that, if the nation is to flourish as an independent nation, the U.S. will be required to play a continuing role in maintaining security there for a long time to come.

HLS Dean Martha Minow was interviewed on August 22 for the ‘Bibliophiles’ column in the Boston Globe. In the Q&A, Minow talks about her own summer reading list, book groups with the President, and the relevance of fiction and poetry in advancing our national dialogue on ethnic and religious conflict.

If it’s illegal to copy books and paintings, why should fashion designs be any different? That was the question posed by HLS Professor Jeannie Suk ‘02 and Columbia Law Professor C. Scott Hemphill in a recent op-ed in the Wall Street Journal

Harvard Law School Professor Robert Mnookin ’68 appeared on PBS NewsHour on August 25. He spoke with economics correspondent Paul Solman about the rewards and challenges of negotiation. Mnookin is the author of “Bargaining with the Devil: When to Negotiate, When to Fight,” which was published by Simon & Schuster in February.