Teaching & Learning

In her address to the Class of 2011, Dean Martha Minow praised the students’ accomplishments at HLS and their vast array of skills and achievements. But as they prepared to receive their diplomas, she emphasized the importance of one skill in particular, urging them to “cherish your talent for asking good questions.”

Alec Baldwin never intended to become an actor – he wanted to be a lawyer. From the age of 10, he bonded with his father by watching the evening news, absorbing great moments in American history; watching political leaders write the narrative of the 20th century. “It was right about then that I decided I wanted to be a lawyer, at 10 years old,” he told the Harvard Law School graduating class, as the student-selected 2011 Class Day speaker.

Army Brigadier General Mark Martins ’90 accepted the Medal of Freedom, the highest honor conferred by Harvard Law School, and gave the inaugural Dean’s Distinguished Lecture on April 18 at HLS.

The Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard helped shape the agenda of Rethink Music, a recent conference that brought together legal, business, and academic experts to discuss new business models for creating and distributing music.

Mihir A. Desai, who currently serves as the Mizuho Financial Group Professor of Finance, the Senior Associate Dean for Planning and University Affairs, and the Chair of Doctoral Programs at Harvard Business School, has accepted a joint appointment to the faculty of Harvard Law School as a tenured Professor of Law.

In April, Harvard Law School participated in festivities commemorating Earth Month at Harvard, an inaugural initiative featuring university-wide events and activities to celebrate and raise awareness about environmental issues.  

At an event hosted by the Harvard Women’s Law Association on April 19, 2011, Joseph M. Sellers, head of the Civil Rights and Employment practice group at Cohen Milstein, shared his experience working on Dukes v. Wal-Mart Stores, the largest civil rights class action suit in the United States.

In light of the recent controversy over President Barack Obama’s birth certificate, Harvard Law School Professor Randall Kennedy espouses his views on the subject in the May 12 edition of The New Republic online.

This year, the Harvard Mediation Program (HMP) (a Student Practice Organization) celebrates its 30th anniversary of training students and community volunteers to mediate disputes in small claims court and other settings.

Harvard Law School Professor Philip Heymann contends that the crisis in Mexico involving drug cartels needs to be examined from the broader perspective of organized crime and its use of violence—not just as a drug-trafficking issue. For the second year in a row, a working group was assembled to take the next step of addressing the issues in very concrete detail. About 30 law-enforcement officials, prosecutors, investigators, legal scholars and proponents of treatment and prevention were in attendance.

It is imperative that governments uphold their obligation to ban cluster munitions absolutely, which is laid out in a treaty that more than 100 countries have joined, said a panel of disarmament experts in an HLS talk last week. Sponsored by the Harvard Law School Forum and the Harvard Human Rights Program, the panel described how the Convention on Cluster Munitions (CCM) was formed, and the challenges its advocates are facing despite its progress thus far.

In a talk at Harvard Law School on April 13, Carlos Castresana Fernandez, renowned Spanish prosecutor and head of the International Commission against Organized Crime in Guatemala (CICIG), offered an assessment of challenges facing the international body charged with investigating and prosecuting serious crime.

Thomas Bodström, former Swedish Minister for Justice, discussed several key pieces of legislation implicated in the legal actions taken against Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, at an event hosted by the Harvard European Law Association and the Center for European Studies on Friday, April 8, 2011.

Holger Spamann L.L.M. ’01 S.J.D. ’09, an expert in corporate governance and finance, will join the Harvard Law School faculty in July as an Assistant Professor of Law.

Richard J. Lazarus ’79, one of the nation’s foremost experts on environmental law and also a leading practitioner in the U.S. Supreme Court, will join the Harvard Law School faculty this summer as a tenured Professor of Law.

Former Harvard President and recent director of the White House National Economic Council Lawrence H. Summers stressed the importance of reducing the nation’s unemployment rate and bringing government spending and revenue into greater alignment, at a talk hosted by the Harvard Law School Forum on April 12, 2011.

“Liberty and justice for all” and other quintessentially American ideals must be extended to Muslim-Americans in the face of anti-Islamic rhetoric in the nation, said Democratic Congressman Keith Ellison of Minnesota, the first Muslim to be elected to the United States Congress, during an event at the Harvard Law School on March 28.

In her remarks at the 14th annual Harvard Latino Law, Policy and Business Conference, to Cecilia Muñoz, Director of Intergovernmental Affairs at the White House, discussed the implications for both the Latino community and the country of the 2010 census results, which found that Latinos are now the nation's largest minority group.

With a mixture of storytelling about his groundbreaking role in amateur basketball and critiques of the NCAA and NBA, former sports marketing executive Sonny Vaccaro gave the keynote address at the third annual HLS Sports Law Symposium on March 25.

Speaking to students at a lecture sponsored by the Harvard Law School Advocates for Human Rights on March 9, Nobel Peace Prize nominee Dr. Gene Sharp discussed various elements of an effective nonviolent struggle and addressed the recent demonstrations in the Middle East in light of his research.

Daniel Ellsberg, the former military analyst responsible for leaking the Pentagon Papers in 1971, addressed a Harvard Law School audience last week in a discussion of WikiLeaks, the organization that publishes classified documents submitted by whistleblowers worldwide. Once called “the most dangerous man in America,” Ellsberg, who will turn 80 on April 7, engaged in a dialog with Scott Horton, a lecturer at Columbia Law School, about why states keep secrets and the consequences of this secrecy.