Faculty Scholarship

On Dec. 14, Harvard Law School Professor Adriaan Lanni gave the annual Kyriakos Tsakopoulos Lecture on Aristotle and the Moderns at Columbia University. The title of the talk was “Reconciliation after Mass Atrocity: Lessons from Ancient Athens.”

America Is on Trial as Much as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed Professor Alan Dershowitz
The Globe and Mail
Nov. 13, 2009 “The Obama administration has announced…

On Jan. 22, 2009, President Barack Obama ’91 signed an executive order mandating that individuals detained in armed conflict will “be treated humanely and shall not be subjected to violence to life and person.” Harvard Law School Professor Philip Heymann ’60 had an answer. And his proposal may soon become the standard for the how the United States handles interrogations to prevent future terrorist attacks.

“The Road to Abolition?: The Future of Capital Punishment in the United States” (New York University Press, 2009), edited by Professor Charles Ogletree Jr. ’78 and Austin Sarat, takes on an interdisciplinary exploration of the debate surrounding the death penalty at the turn of the 21st century.

“Stubborn as a Mule,” is set at a small liberal arts college in Maine. The school’s president, a right-wing economist, tries to unseat a Republican Senate moderate (and HLS grad).

Since U.S. forces started taking alleged terrorists to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the task of crafting American detention policy has migrated decisively from the executive branch to federal judges. These judges, not experts in terrorism or national security and not politically accountable to the electorate, inherited this responsibility because of the Supreme Court's intervention in detention policy. Over time they maintained it because legislative and executive officials of both political parties refused to craft a comprehensive legislative approach to this novel set of problems that cries out for decisive lawmaking.

HLS Professor Elizabeth Warren was named the “Bostonian of the Year” for 2009 by the Boston Globe. The annual award, which recognizes people who have made the greatest impact on the region, was awarded to Warren for her role as chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel on the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP).

Professor Mark Roe's op-ed entitled “End bankruptcy priority for derivatives, repos and swaps,” appeared in the Dec. 16, 2009, edition of the Financial Times.

In their book,“No Place to Hide: Gang, State, and Clandestine Violence in El Salvador” (Harvard University Press, 2009), Clinical Professor James Cavallaro and Spring…

Harvard Law School Professor Hal Scott's op-ed, “Do we really need a systemic regulator?” appeared in the December 11, 2009, edition of the Wall Street Journal.

HLS Leo Gottlieb Professor of Law Elizabeth Warren discussed the future of the foreclosure crisis in the United States and what should be done to improve the current situation on a National Public Radio program that aired December 9.

Harvard Law School Professor Jonathan Zittrain's op-ed, “Work the new digital sweatshops,” appeared in the December 8, 2009, edition of Newsweek Magazine.

To prevent domestic violence, do we now overregulate the home? A scholar raises some provocative questions.

The op-ed, “Bankers had cashed in before the music stopped,” was co-written by Harvard Law School Professor Lucian Bebchuk LL.M. ’80 S.J.D. ’84, Visiting Professor Alma Cohen, and Lecturer on Law Holger Spamann S.J.D. ’09. It appeared in the December 7, 2009, edition of the Financial Times.

HLS Professor Elizabeth Warren's op-ed entitled “America without a Middle Class,”  appeared in the Dec. 2, 2009 edition of The Huffington Post. Warren is chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel on the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP).

This op-ed by Harvard Law School Professors Lucian Bebchuk LL.M. ’80 S.J.D ’84. and Jesse Fried, entitled “Taming the Stock Option Game,” appeared in the November 2009 edition of Project Syndicate. This article builds on their study “Equity Compensation for Long-term Performance.” Bebchuk and Fried are co-authors of “Pay without Performance: The Unfulfilled Promise of Executive Compensation.”

This year's outbreak of the H1N1 influenza has demonstrated that contagions know few boundaries and spread wherever they can find an available host. Likewise, because of their broad jurisdictional rules, U.S. courts can be easy targets for "forum shopping" by foreign plaintiffs seeking redress against American companies for torts they claim have taken place abroad.

Milton Hershey had no children so he said he would make the “orphan boys of the United States” his heirs.To that end, the chocolatier founded the Milton Hershey School, which today serves 1,700 underprivileged children and has an endowment of $6.2 billion. In 2005, Hershey had the nation’s fifth largest endowment, which was about half the size of Princeton’s and Stanford’s but larger than that of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Harvard Law School Dean Martha Minow was honored at the 40th Anniversary Celebration of the Massachusetts Advocates for Children (MAC) on November 13, along with Marian Wright Edelman, president of the Children’s Defense Fund, and the late Senator Edward Kennedy.

Reasonable minds can disagree about Attorney General Eric Holder's decision to prosecute Khalid Sheik Mohammed and four other alleged Sept. 11 perpetrators in a Manhattan federal court. But some prominent criticisms are exaggerated, and others place undue faith in military commissions as an alternative to civilian trials.