Student Spotlights

Harvard Law School tied for third place at the international finals of the World Trade Organization (WTO) moot court competition. This was HLS’s first year participating in the competition.

The American Association of University Women recently awarded Sunshine Yin ’13 the Selected Professions Fellowship to support her work in the area of intellectual property law. The fellowship, which includes an $18,000 award, is given annually in areas where women’s participation has traditionally been low, such as law, medicine, architecture, engineering and mathematics.

Two HLS students, Adam Gottesfeld '12 and Joey Seiler '12, recently won Rethink Music’s Genesis Project, a startup competition that aims to encourage and support creativity in the music industry. The duo will receive $10,000 in legal services from the firm Duane Morris, additional in-kind consulting and at least three meetings with venture capitalists.

For students interested in the confluence of business and law, there is one group on campus that has taken the lead in connecting them with business figures for career advice. The Harvard Association for Law and Business has grown from an organization of 50 to one of more than 700 members—drawn by a robust weekly speaker series as well as other events that promote networking and mentoring, among other benefits.

The scope of Harvard Law School's Environmental Law Program has grown significantly since Professor Jody Freeman LL.M. ’91 S.J.D. ’95 launched it six years ago “with the ambition of building the best environmental law and policy program in the world.”

While in college, Clara Long '12 spent a spring semester in Belém, Brazil. “That totally changed the trajectory of my life,” she said, and turned a passion for tending the environment into “something that was much more about people.” Now graduating from Harvard Law School, Long is interested in human rights, and views her education at Harvard as a way of acquiring “tools for dealing with injustice.”

A number of Harvard Law students received special awards this year during the 2012 Class Day exercises on May 23. The honored students were recognized for their outstanding leadership, citizenship, compassion and dedication to their studies and the profession.

Rajan Sonik ’12 is the winner of this year’s Andrew L. Kaufman Pro Bono Service Award, recognized for performing the highest number of pro bono service hours in the Class of 2012. During his time at Harvard Law School, Sonik provided over 2,500 hours of free legal services.

Harvard Law School graduation festivities began on Class Day, Wednesday, May 23, and continued through Commencement Day on Thursday, May 24.

Where can you pick up a lunch with Larry Summers, a fashion-forward shopping spree with a Harvard Law School professor or a Justice David Souter bobblehead? The HLS annual Public Interest Auction, of course.

Harvard Law School S.J.D. candidate Claire Houston has been named a recipient of the Julius B. Richmond Fellowship from the Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University. She will receive a dissertation grant totaling $10,000 from the Center to fund independent research during the 2012-13 academic year. Houston is the first student from HLS to be awarded this honor.

On April 27, Harvard University honored a group of 10 students chosen as 2012 Presidential Fellows for their commitment to public service initiatives, only the second group to be awarded grants from the Presidential Public Service Fellowship Program at Harvard. Current Harvard Law School students Crystal Redd '13 and Angela Chuang '13 were among those selected as fellows.

At an April 9 ceremony at Harvard Law School, HLS student Sam Levine ‘12 and alumnus Bill Beardall ’78 received the Gary Bellow Public Service Award, given annually by the HLS student body, for their commitment to public interest and social justice work.

Harvard Law School student Rajan Sonik ‘12 recently received the 2012 Law Student Ethics Award from the Association of Corporate Counsel, Northeast Chapter. One of eleven students honored from participating local law schools, Sonik was recognized for demonstrating an early commitment to ethics through his work in a clinical program.

An article by Harvard Law School S.J.D. candidate Andrew Tuch has been voted by the nation’s corporate and securities law professors as one of the top ten corporate and securities law papers of 2011. The article, “Multiple Gatekeepers,” was originally published in the Virginia Law Review.

The winners of Harvard Law School’s 59th annual Williston Competition, Harvard’s annual contract negotiation and drafting competition for first-year law students, were announced on April 19.

Students from Harvard Law School took second place in the 22nd Annual National Criminal Justice Trial Advocacy Competition, held March 29-31, in Chicago.

Women played an important role in the Arab Spring revolutions, and their involvement is crucial to the ongoing political change in the region. To that end, the Harvard Law School Women’s Law Association sponsored an event presenting the perspectives of several HLS and Harvard Kennedy School women students from Egypt, Lebanon, and Saudi Arabia. The Women in the Arab Awakening panelists discussed their experiences as both activists in and observers of these events, and the subsequent impact the revolutions have had on women.

Nine Harvard Law School students recently participated in the 2012 Willem C. Vis International Commercial Arbitration Moot Competitions in Vienna and Hong Kong. Nearly 400 law school teams from around the world participated in the Vis Competition, which aims to train future leaders in methods of alternative dispute resolution.

Last fall, the Harvard Law Documentary Studio offered Lauren Estévez ’13 and four other students the training, funding and equipment they needed to make a short documentary film. It was a challenge, fitting filmmaking into law school. But after months of research, shooting, and editing, Estévez’s 12-minute film about the lives of citrus workers in Florida screened this month at the Harvard Film Archive, part of the Studio’s first annual DOC Festival.