Student Spotlights

An estimated 400 Harvard Law School students, faculty and staff gathered in Pound Hall for a “Thanksgiving for the Troops” on November 18, raising money and collecting items for soldiers serving in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The final round of Harvard Law School’s annual Ames Moot Court Competition was held on November 16, 2009, in Ames Courtroom. Richard A. Posner, of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, presided as chief justice. Joining him on the panel were Diane P. Wood of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit and Barrington D. Parker of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.

The U.S. District Court in the Southern District of Florida has ruled that the claims for crimes against humanity and extrajudicial killings could move forward in two related U.S. cases against former Bolivian President Gonzalo Daniel Sánchez de Lozada Sánchez Bustamante (Sánchez de Lozada) and former Bolivian Defense Minister Jose Carlos Sánchez Berzaín (Sánchez Berzaín). The International Human Rights Clinic at Harvard Law School is part of the legal team that filed the two complaints against Sánchez de Lozada and Sánchez Berzaín.

Jeremy Haber ’13, a joint J.D./M.B.A. student at Harvard Law School and Harvard Business School, has been named a finalist in the Washington Post’s “America’s Next Great Pundit” contest. Haber is one of ten finalists, selected from over 4,800 entries.

A team of Harvard Law students won first place at the 4th National Puerto Rico Trial Advocacy Competition in San Juan. The prestigious “invitation only” competition was sponsored by the Inter-American University of Puerto Rico School of Law and was held at the Old San Juan District Courthouse Oct. 31-Nov. 1.

On Saturday, Oct. 17, the Harvard Law School men’s crew raced in the 45th Head of the Charles, securing its position as the dominant law school on the river. The Head of the Charles is the world’s largest two-day rowing event, involving more than 7,500 athletes and 300,000 spectators from around the world. The HLS crew deftly navigated the three-mile course in 17 minutes and 47 seconds.

Diego, Anastasia and Juan (not their real names) are undocumented immigrants. They are seeking asylum in the United States because if they return to El Salvador, they say they will almost certainly be killed.

The following op-ed by Michelle Kuo ’09 entitled “The Lost Student” appeared in the September 27, 2009, edition of the New York Times magazine.

This summer, hundreds of Harvard Law School students fanned out across the country and around the world to work as summer interns and fellows, exploring career options and using their legal skills in addressing a variety of problems. Here’s a look at four students and their summer experiences:

Daniel Thies ’10 will have an article published in a forthcoming edition of the Journal of Legal Education.  Though students regularly publish "notes" in law reviews and journals, it is more unusual for them to have articles published.

On June 3, as her classmates celebrated Class Day and prepared for graduation ceremonies, Kristina Matic ’09 stood in Roxbury District Court cross-examining a police officer who claimed her client had driven recklessly on his motorcycle and resisted arrest.

n an interview with Rahim Kanani, a research associate at Harvard University’s Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations, Amaka Megwalu ’10 discusses her insights on the aid industry in Africa and the Gacaca Court System in Rwanda. Megwalu has worked on development and post-conflict reconstruction in Rwanda, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Senegal, South Africa and Tunisia.

This fall, a group of Harvard Law School students – Ashwin Krishnan ’10, Josh Podoll ’11, and Ryan Gauthier ’10 – will officially launch a new journal called the Harvard Journal of Sports and Entertainment Law.

Last year, Matthew F. Wells ’09 traveled through Sierra Leone visiting more than two dozen artisanal diamond mines, under the auspices of the International Human Rights Clinic at Harvard Law School.

The Program on Negotiation has announced that Sean McDonnell ’09 has won the Roger Fisher and Frank E.A. Sander Prize for his paper “Fighting With Faith: The Role of Religion in Dealing With Modern Conflict.”

In a diploma ceremony on June 4, 731 members of the Class of 2009 received degrees from Harvard Law School: 567 J.D.s, 151 LL.M.s and 13 S.J.D.s. While the new graduates now all share a common alma mater, the diversity of experiences that brought them to law school and the opportunities they took advantage of while at HLS were very different. Here is a look at some members of the graduating class.

In 2007, when Erika Rickard was a 2L at Harvard Law, same-sex marriage had been legal in Massachusetts for more than three years. By that…

When Ariel Rothstein ’10 and Andrew Freedman ’10 spotted the whirling blue lights of a patrol car behind them as they drove through rural Texas in January, they assumed they had been driving too fast.

Justin Raphael ’09 and Andrew Furlow ’09 both had gained litigation experience during their summer law firm work. But sitting in the U.S. Supreme Court on March 30, watching constitutional scholar Samuel Issacharoff present an oral argument they’d helped research and prepare, they gained an entirely new appreciation of the process.