Faculty Scholarship

The U.S. Senate confirmed Harvard Law School Dean Martha Minow’s appointment to the board of the Legal Services Corporation, a bi-partisan, government-sponsored organization that provides civil legal assistance to low-income Americans, today. Minow was joined by five other nominees in the confirmation by Executive Session, including John Levi '72 LL.M. '73.

The symposium "The NAACP: Reflections on the First 100 Years," explored both the history of the NAACP, which celebrated its 100th anniversary in 2009, and its future. The Feb. 26 event was held at the library’s Thomas Jefferson Building in Washington, D.C.

Harvard Law School Dean Martha Minow and four other law school deans have urged key lawmakers on Capitol Hill to end the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy. “The effects of ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ are marginalization, exclusion, and denigration,” wrote the law school deans in a March 18 letter to the Armed Services committees in the House and Senate.

“The conventional wisdom is that the Supreme Court is an heroic defender of the rights of racial minorities … I want to argue to the contrary. The Supreme Court has been a foe, rather than a friend to racial minorities in general, and African Americans specifically.” That was the opening message delivered by Harvard Law School Professor Michael Klarman in a lecture titled “The Supreme Court and Race” at the American Academy of Arts & Sciences on March 10.

HLS Professor and former Solicitor General ('85-'89) Charles Fried co-wrote an op-ed “What Liz doesn’t get about lawyers,” with Gregory Fried, chairman of the philosophy department at Suffolk University. Their op-ed, which appeared March 15, 2010, on The Daily Beast, criticizes Liz Cheney’s group, Keep America Safe, for unfairly attacking the lawyers who have defended terrorists. 

Grainne de Burca, a leading expert in European Union law, European human rights law, and European and transnational governance, will join the Harvard Law School faculty as a tenured professor of law on July 1.

Professor Adrian Vermeule ‘93 recently published “Intermittent Institutions” as part of the Harvard Law School Public Law and Legal Theory Working Papers series. 

Negotiations between the White House and Congressional leaders of both parties have been undermined by mistakes that could have been avoided by using a better negotiation process, says Robert Bordone, Clinical Professor of Law and Director of the Harvard Negotiation and Mediation Clinical Program at Harvard Law School.

This month, Harvard Law School Dean Martha Minow, the Jeremiah Smith, Jr. Professor, will deliver the 16th annual Rev. Theodore M. Hesburgh Lecture in Ethics and Public Policy at the University of Notre Dame  and the Robert M. Cover Lecture in Law and Religion at Yale Law School.

In today’s New York Times, Alan M. Dershowitz, the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, contributed a post, “Representing the Despised,” in response to the recent release of a video by a conservative advocacy organization, Keep America Safe, which takes aim at lawyers who have represented Guantánamo detainees and are now working in the Justice Department.Dershowitz’s post is one of four commentaries that appeared as part of the Times’ Room for Debate blog post “Attacking Lawyers from the Right and Left.” Dershowitz is the author of many books, including, “Rights from Wrongs: A Secular Theory of the Origins of Rights.”

Professor I. Glenn Cohen ’03, co-director of the Petrie-Flom Center, has written a working paper titled “Protecting Patients with Passports: Medical Tourism and the Patient Protective-Argument.” The working paper examines the growth of “medical tourism” – travel of patients who are residents of one country to another country for medical treatment. 

“Corporate political speech is bad for shareholders,” an op-ed by HLS Professor Lucian Bebchuk LL.M ’80 S.J.D. ’84, is the latest installment of his monthly column in Project Syndicate.

Harvard law School Professor Adrian Vermeule ’93 wrote the book review “States of Detention,” which appeared in The New Republic on March 1, 2010. 

Harvard Law School Professor Hal Scott has been named co-chair of the newly-organized Council on Global Financial Regulation.

Professor Jody Freeman will return to the Harvard Law School faculty in March 2010, after serving in the White House as Counselor for Energy and Climate Change since January, 2009.

Robert Greenwald, Managing Director of the WilmerHale Legal Services Center at HLS, was appointed on Feb. 1 to the Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS (PACHA). PACHA provides advice, information, and recommendations to the Secretary of Health and Human Services and the President regarding programs and policies intended to promote effective care, treatment, and prevention of HIV disease, and to advance research on HIV disease and AIDS.

Lecturer on Law Peter Carfagna ’79 has been a practicing sports law attorney for nearly 30 years. A partner at Partner, Calfee, Halter & Griswold…

Robert Anderson, associate professor of law and Director of the University of Washington School of Law’s Native American Law Center, will be the Oneida Nation Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard Law School for five years, a term that begins in the fall of 2010.