Faculty Scholarship

David Shapiro represents the true Renaissance man of legal academia. He has been a scholar, reformer, advocate, public servant and teacher, and at every turn, he has been a leader and model of excellence. There is much in his brilliant career to celebrate.

Imagine for a moment a lawsuit involving, as so many of them do, a dispute over accounting practices. Now add some complex questions of federal jurisdiction and procedure. Then assume that the parties decide—wisely—to settle. As the saying goes, “Who you gonna call?”

The influence of a great teacher like Dave Herwitz brings him nearer to immortality than most of us get. In my own nearly 50 years of professional life, I have met numerous wonderful individuals and benefited from the wisdom and character of many.

Scholars have long been fascinated by the democracy of classical Athens and the ways it is mirrored in democratic governments of today. Athenian law, on the other hand, has received little attention, since no modern legal system is descended from it.

The following op-ed, co-written by Professor Hal Scott, The End of American dominance in capital markets, was published in The Financial Times on July 19, 2006: Is a ticker-taped Trojan Horse soon to be planted on European shores, filled with an army of US regulators, Sarbanes-Oxley accountants and overzealous plaintiff lawyers?

When I first began to work with Frank Sander ’52 as a 3L at Harvard Law School in 1997, I realized that when it came to finding a mentor in alternative dispute resolution, I had struck gold.

The Delaware Chancery Court issued a decision in the litigation initiated by Professor Lucian Bebchuk against CA Inc. The decision forced CA to withdraw its plan to exclude Bebchuk's poison pill proposal from the corporate ballot and opens the door to shareholder voting on such proposals in other companies.

Unfinished business: Roscoe Pound in China Roscoe Pound, HLS dean from 1916 to 1936, was ready for a new challenge in 1946 when the Kuomintang…

According to one prediction, the new technology will bring every individual “into immediate and effortless communication with every other” and will “practically obliterate political geography and make free trade universal.”

This weekend, leaders of the financial systems of the United States and China will gather in Tianjin, China to examine the financial relationship between the two countries. Organized by HLS's Program on International Financial Systems and the China Development Research Foundation, the "Symposium on Building the Financial System of the 21st Century: An Agenda for China and the United States" will allow participants from the U.S. and China to discuss financial challenges facing the two nations.

The following essay by Professor Glendon was published in the June/July issue of First Things: Not for the first time, the world finds itself in an age of great movements of peoples. And once again, the United States is confronted with the challenge of absorbing large numbers of newcomers. There are approximately 200 million migrants and refugees worldwide, triple the number estimated by the UN only seventeen years ago.

Professor Hal Scott and the HLS Program on International Financial Systems have released a white paper based on a half-day symposium that focused on key issues of corporate governance affecting companies, investors, and financial markets globally. Cosponsored by the Program on International Financial Systems, Standard and Poor’s and BusinessWeek, the symposium convened in New York on December 6, 2005.

With a little help from your friends: Amicus briefs are meant to offer judges some extra information. But is amicus practice getting out of hand?

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer '64 talks with the Bulletin in chambers.

In "Preemption: A Knife That Cuts Both Ways" (W. W. Norton, 2006), Professor Alan M. Dershowitz examines America's increasing reliance on pre-emptive action to control destructive conduct, and discusses the implications for civil liberties, human rights, criminal justice, national security and foreign policy.

Judge Samuel A. Alito Jr.'s opponents have seized upon two memorandums he wrote when he was a junior lawyer in the office of the solicitor general....

Today, approximately 80 private and public sector financial leaders will meet in Armonk, N.Y. to discuss issues affecting the future of the financial relationship between the EU and the U.S. The fourth annual "Symposium on Building the Financial System of the 21st Century: An Agenda for Europe and the United States" is sponsored by HLS's Program on International Financial Systems, along with the Centre for European Policy Studies.

Lucian Bebchuk, director of HLS's Program on Corporate Governance, was named as one of this year's "100 most influential people in finance" by Treasury and Risk Management magazine. The list recognizes leaders in corporate finance, ranging from CEOs to regulators to academics.