Teaching & Learning

The academic work of the Harvard Law School faculty is downloaded from the online database of the Social Science Research Network (SSRN) more frequently than that of any other law school faculty, according to the popular law blog, Brian Leiter’s Law School Reports. Works by HLS faculty were downloaded 107,591 times during the period studied for the survey.

As the ground shifts, an expert evaluates the role of litigation.

A major research project from Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society’s Internet and Democracy Project has lent enormous insight into the previously unexplored flow of online communication in the Middle East and North Africa. The study, “Mapping the Arabic Blogosphere: Politics, Culture and Dissent,” comes at a time of tremendous political unrest and electronic activism in the Middle East.

Assistant Professors of Law I. Glenn Cohen ’03 and Benjamin Roin ’05 are the new co-directors of the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School. Professor Einer Elhauge ’86, who has served as faculty director since the Center’s founding in 2005, will remain associated with the research program as its Founding Director.

In March, coinciding with the one-year anniversary of a crackdown on protests in Tibetan regions in China, people across the PRC found they couldn’t access YouTube—which had hosted videos of the protests the year before.

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.

Randall Kennedy, the Michael R. Klein Professor of Law at HLS, addressed members of Phi Theta Kappa at the 2009 Honors Institute at the University of Richmond in Virginia in June.

For students looking for cutting-edge legal work in the realm of new technologies, there may be no better place than the Cyberlaw Clinic at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society. In the fall of 2008, more than 40 students were involved in a wide range of projects that explored areas such as free speech, intellectual property and online child safety in the context of the Internet and other rapidly developing technologies. Many of the projects the center undertook involves issues being litigated for the first time.

This weekend, leaders from the United States and China will gather in Cambridge to examine challenges facing the financial sectors of the two countries. The annual “Symposium on Building the Financial System of the 21st Century: An Agenda for China and the United States” is organized by Harvard Law School’s Program on International Financial Systems (PIFS) and the China Development Research Foundation (CDRF).

David Kennedy ’80, a renowned expert in international law, returned to Harvard Law School as a full-time professor in the fall of 2009. Kennedy was on the HLS full-time faculty for more than three decades until he became vice president for International Affairs at Brown University in 2008.

In an April 29 lecture, Harvard Law School Professor Robert H. Sitkoff discussed the causes and consequences of revolutionary changes in American trust law. The talk, entitled “Lawyers, Banks, and Money: The Quiet Revolution in American Trust Law,” was part of an event honoring Sitkoff on his appointment as the John L. Gray Professor of Law. (Watch a webcast of the event.)

Jesse Fried ’92, a leading expert in executive compensation, corporate governance, corporate bankruptcy, and venture capital, will join the Harvard Law School faculty in the fall. He is currently a professor of law at the University of California at Berkeley.

On June 3, General David Petraeus, the current Commander of U.S. Central Command, was on hand for the re-commissioning ceremony of two military officers who were being promoted to the rank of Captain—one in the Army and the other in the Air Force. Kyle Scherer ’09 and Nicholas Siler took their oaths in the Caspersen Room of Langdell Library.

In the 2009-10 academic year, Harvard Law School will provide up to 12 qualifying post-9/11 veterans full tuition under the federal government’s new Yellow Ribbon Program, Acting Dean Howell Jackson ’82 announced today.

During Class Day exercises on June 3, Professor Elizabeth Warren received the Class of 2009’s Sacks-Freund Teaching Award in honor of her teaching ability, openness to student concerns and contributions to student life at HLS.

On April 24, Harvard Law School Professor Emeritus Bernard Wolfman, a leading tax law expert, spoke on “Ethical Problems in Tax Practice” at the Sixth Annual Institute on Tax Aspects of Mergers and Acquisitions. The event, held at the offices of the New York City Bar, was presented by the New York City Bar in conjunction with the Center for the Study of Mergers and Acquisitions of Pennsylvania State University’s Dickinson School of Law.

Robert Bordone ’97, formerly the Thaddeus R. Beal Assistant Clinical Professor of Law, has been named a full clinical professor of law. An expert in negotiation and dispute resolution, Bordone is the founding director of the Harvard Law School Negotiation and Mediation Clinical Program.

On April 24, HLS hosted a panel discussion titled “The International Face of Harvard Law School.” The panel, moderated by Professor William Alford ’77, included John F. Cogan, Jr. ’52 and four current HLS students who described their experiences in the international law program at HLS.

Officially, it’s the “Annual Police Union Leadership Seminar,” but it’s more memorably known as “The Big 50”—Harvard Law School’s convention of police union leaders from the fifty largest cities in the United States.

On April 15, Venezuelan Supreme Court Justice Vegas Torrealba discussed his country’s justice system during a talk entitled, “Role of Human Rights, Gender Equality, and Race in Venezuelan Law.” The event was sponsored by the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice.

The International Human Rights Clinic at Harvard Law School’s Human Rights Program has been working since 2005 on corporate Alien Tort Statute (ATS) litigation involving human rights abuses committed in apartheid South Africa.