Teaching & Learning

As part of the Views from Washington lecture series at Harvard Law School, Kenneth Feinberg, the prominent lawyer with a reputation for resolving complicated claims cases, shared his experiences with law students in November. Feinberg is currently the administrator for the Gulf Coast Claims Facility, dealing with the aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon disaster.

As a spate of head injuries in football made national headlines in October, students in a Sports Law class at Harvard Law School got a firsthand account of the dangers—and consequences—of head trauma in the NFL.

On October 21, Canon Andrew White delivered a lecture titled “Pursuing Reconciliation in Iraq: The Art of Mediation Between Warring Religious Factions.” Co-sponsored by the Human Rights Program and the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the Kennedy School, the lecture focused on the role that religion must play in the peacemaking process in the Middle East.

Twenty senior federal officials – both Republicans and Democrats – met in Washington in July to hone their negotiation and consensus building skills with members of the Harvard Negotiation and Mediation Clinical Program (HNMCP) at Harvard Law School.

In an HLS panel discussion titled “Life of the Law, Life of the Mind,” Dean Martha Minow and Professors of Law Jeannie Suk and Noah Feldman stressed the importance of recognizing and embracing the differences between legal training and academic experience.

Harvard Law School’s International Human Rights Clinic submitted an amicus curiae brief to the Second Circuit in support of a petition for rehearing en banc in a major corporate Alien Tort Statute (“ATS”) case, Kiobel, et al. v. Royal Dutch Petroleum Co., et al.

Reverend Professor Ian Ker of Oxford University gave a lecture on John Henry Newman’s “The Idea of a University” at Harvard Law School in September, arguing that careful attention is needed to understand Newman’s perspective on the goals of a university in light of modern day assumptions about education.

On October 15 and 16, 2010, the Harvard Law School Program on the Legal Profession hosted FutureEd 2: Making Lawyers for the 21st Century. Legal scholars, practitioners and regulators from around the world gathered in Cambridge to discuss the evolution and future of legal education, and to present proposals for change.

On Oct. 12, Judge Virginia A. Phillips of Federal District Court for the Central District of California issued an injunction barring enforcement of don’t ask, don’t tell, the law that prohibits openly gay men and women from serving in the military.

In a public lecture sponsored by the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics, Thomas Scanlon, Alford Professor of Natural Religion, Morality, and Civil Policy at Harvard, discussed individual morality and the morality of institutions.  

In a Harvard Law School discussion on immigration law, three expert panelists offered perspectives from the trenches on Arizona SB 1070, the controversial immigration law enacted earlier this year.

In a recent panel discussion at Harvard Law School, professors William Alford, Grainne de Burca, and Gerald Neuman extolled the benefits of studying, interning, and working abroad in a legal context, and offered practical advice to internationally-minded students about how to get started.

In a Harvard Law School lecture sponsored by the American Constitution Society, Linda Greenhouse, former Supreme Court correspondent for The New York Times, discussed “the Roberts Court at Five.”

On Monday, September 27, Harvard Law School’s Program on Negotiation will honor the former President of Finland, Martti Ahtisaari, with the 2010 Great Negotiator Award.

In early September, Timothy Endicott, dean of the faculty of law at Oxford University and a professor of legal philosophy, spoke to an overflow audience in Pound Hall on how judges in Europe and the United States have ruled on the territorial extent of human rights.  

Last year, as part of Harvard’s International Human Rights Clinic, Susannah Knox ’10 and Lauren Pappone ’11, traveled to British Columbia with Lecturer on Law and Clinical Instructor Bonnie Docherty '01 to investigate how mining affects the Takla Lake First Nation people.

Lisa Bernstein ’90 knew from her first day of law school that she wanted to be a professor, though as time went on, she wondered whether that would be possible without top grades or law review credentials. What helped to set her apart from other applicants, she says, was the paper she wrote—and mentoring she received—as an Olin Fellow during law school.

The Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University will conduct an independent, exploratory study analyzing the communication and decision-making processes of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the organization responsible for managing the internet's domain name system.