Teaching & Learning

The Board of Veterans’ Appeals of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs denies a soldier’s claim for disability benefits for an injury that occurred while he was on active duty. But the decision is handed down while the soldier is redeployed to Afghanistan, and he doesn’t realize he has the right to appeal until after he returns stateside—after the appeal deadline has passed. For students in HLS’s new Veterans Legal Clinic, the chance to work on this case and others like it is eye-opening.

Ernest Shackleton’s first journey to the Antarctic in the early 1900s ended in a very public failure. On his second journey, in a race to the South Pole, he turned back within 100 miles of his goal. In his third expedition, not only did he fail to traverse Antarctica, but his ship was destroyed by ice, stranding the crew on ice floes for more than a year. So why do law and business students and executives in legal and business organizations study Shackleton as an example of successful leadership?

Stephanie Atwood ’13 started her 3L year several days early in a basement classroom of Wasserstein Hall in a new intensive “boot camp” on accounting and finance. In just three days, Atwood and 44 classmates learned a credit’s worth of previously foreign-sounding concepts such as internal rate of return and the cost of capital.

CopyrightX, the new, experimental, Web-based Harvard Law School course which prioritizes the human dimension of online teaching, is the brainchild of Professor Terry Fisher, who is committed to what he calls the democratization of higher education.

Many for-profit colleges, which get the overwhelming majority of their revenues from federal financial aid programs, rely on high-pressure tactics and false employment and salary guarantees to lure students into taking out loans. Now, through the efforts of Harvard Law School alum Toby Merrill ’11, some of the victims of these practices can get free legal aid to enforce their rights.

Alex Whiting, who currently serves as the prosecution coordinator in the Office of the Prosecutor at the International Criminal Court, will rejoin the Harvard Law School faculty this July as a professor of practice. Whiting previously taught at HLS as an assistant clinical professor.

Harvard Law School Professor Jonathan Zittrain '95 delivered the keynote speech at the recent Harvard IT Summit, devoting his lecture to the potential “end of .edu.” Zittrain is also a professor at Harvard Kennedy School, and the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, as well as the co-founder of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University.

Former Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis ’60, who was the Democratic nominee for president in 1988 and is now a professor of political science at Northeastern University, visited a session of Harvard Law School’s Negotiation Workshop in late April to lead discussion of a case study and answer student questions.

With national attention focused on the obesity epidemic and the diabetes crisis—along with rapidly growing concerns about social justice and environmental problems related to the current food-production system—there may be no hotter topic in law schools right now than food law and policy. The wildly popular new Harvard Law School Food Law and Policy Clinic, the first law school clinic of its kind in the world, is right at the center, with students working on a wide range of projects to make healthy food more accessible, help farmers’ markets overcome regulatory barriers so they can sell more of their products, guide states and local communities in creating food policy councils, and more.

Professor Benjamin I. Sachs is this year’s winner of the prestigious Albert M. Sacks-Paul A. Freund Award for Teaching Excellence, an honor bestowed each spring by the Harvard Law School graduating class. The award recognizes teaching ability, attentiveness to student concerns and general contributions to student life at the law school.

Isabel Lima, office manager at the HLS WilmerHale Legal Services Center in the Jamaica Plain neighborhood of Boston, received the Suzanne L. Richardson Staff Appreciation Award during Class Day exercises on May 29. She was selected by the Class of 2013 for going above and beyond in assisting the many students who pass through the WilmerHale center, helping the organization to run effectively, as well as acting as a liaison to the many Spanish-speaking clients and neighbors in the community.

Author, lawyer and Emmy Award-winning legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin ’86 will serve as Class Day speaker on May 29 at Harvard Law School.

This semester, Harvard Law School launched the Law and History program of study, which is headed by two faculty leaders: Professor Tomiko Brown-Nagin, who is also a Professor of History in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and Professor Kenneth Mack. In a Q&A, Brown-Nagin discusses the origins and goals of the new program of study as well as her own scholarship.

Fifty years after the Supreme Court determined in Gideon v. Wainwright that criminal defendants must be provided with counsel, scholars and practitioners from around the country grappled with continued limits on access to justice during an Harvard Law School conference in April titled “Toward a Civil Gideon: The Future of Legal Services.”

Harvard Law School has announced the appointment of Urs Gasser LL.M. ’03, executive director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, as a Professor of Practice.

Environmental lawlessness was the topic of discussion on April 10, as Richard Lazarus ’79, one of the nation’s foremost experts on environmental law, gave a lecture marking his appointment to the Howard J. and Katherine W. Aibel Professorship of Law.

Last month, as an historic trial continued in Guatemala against a former dictator charged with the genocide of indigenous Mayans, Lauren Herman ’13—a student in the Harvard Immigration and Refugee Clinic (HIRC) —stood in court in Boston as a judge announced he was granting asylum to her Mayan client, who, with his family, had suffered persecution for decades before he came to the U.S. in 2009.

The manhunt for a bombing suspect shut down the Boston area on Friday. With Harvard temporarily closed, a pair of two-day scholarly conferences had to be compressed into Saturday alone. But by chance, both provided perspective on the area’s brush with terror.