Today Posts

International trade traditionally has been a Harvard Law School strength, but since Mark Wu’s arrival at HLS in 2011, educational opportunities in the field have exploded.

Of all the issues engendering voter passion in the 2016 U.S. presidential race—immigration, terrorism, Supreme Court appointments—perhaps none has been more surprising than global trade, especially the highly controversial Trans-Pacific Partnership.

“Diversity in Practice: Race, Gender, and Class in Legal and Professional Careers,” edited by Professor David B. Wilkins ’80, Spencer Headworth, Robert L. Nelson and Ronit Dinovitzer (Cambridge) Wilkins, director of the school’s Center on the Legal Profession, serves as co-editor and also co-writes an essay in this volume, which contrasts the rhetoric that widely embraces the goal of diversity in the legal and other professions with the reality of continued barriers to full inclusion.

HLS hosted the fourth Celebration of Black Alumni in September, featuring the theme “Turning Vision into Action.” The actions of alumni who attended have resonated in courtrooms and classrooms, in elected office and the corner office, in communities and in the culture. The Bulletin spoke with five CBA participants about where their vision has led them and where they hope to yet go.

By now, many people are familiar with bitcoin. What’s less well known is the currency’s technological underpinning, the blockchain, an emergent technology that could reshape financial and property markets, and the legal frameworks that support them.

The Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance and Financial Regulation blog has been serving as a forum for exchange of ideas and debate among lawyers, executives, institutional investors, academics and regulators for the past 10 years.

Don Krohn's long career has taken him around the world, but in his new new collection of photographs Krohn '87 turns his focus to his home on the coast of Massachusetts.

A father’s fight for justice, a modern-day Beowulf, an American heiress

When Kelly Shapiro ’05 started her own entertainment law practice last year after stepping down as VP of a real estate investment trust, she had no intention of working on a TV show.

James Alan McPherson ’68 grew up in poverty in segregated Georgia, and went on to write short fiction and essays that deftly explore race, class and community and what it means to be human. He was the first black author to receive the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

Not everyone at the Harvard Law School in the mid to late 1960s understood that a student named James Alan McPherson—a young African-American man who would later go on to be the first in our class to receive a McArthur “genius” grant—was in fact a genius.

As a child, Raymond Atuguba was regularly confronted by the harsh realities of poverty in Ghana. His father, a civil servant posted to rural areas, owned the only car for miles around. “Every emergency was brought to our door. If the car was not functioning, people died—on a daily basis—because they could not get to the hospital,” recalls Atuguba. “When I grew up, I said, ‘No, this has to change.’”

Each moment bridges past and future; moments at HLS invite reflections on the past and renewed focus for the future.

South Africa has failed to meet its human rights obligations to address the environmental and health effects of gold mining in and around Johannesburg, the Harvard Law School International Human Rights Clinic (IHRC) said in a new report.

In commemoration of the 70th anniversary of the Nuremberg Trials, Harvard Law School Professor Alex Whiting moderated a conversation between Ambassador Christian Wenaweser, permanent representative of Liechtenstein to the United Nations, and Harold Hongju Koh ’80, who served as legal adviser of the U.S. Department of State.

In October, The Program on International Financial Systems (PIFS) at Harvard Law School celebrated its 30th anniversary by holding the kind of symposium it has been hosting for three decades — convening financial leaders, high-ranking government officials, and distinguished academics from around the world to discuss the most pressing issues in international finance.

Earlier this month, Harvard Law School’s Royall Professor of Law, Janet Halley, took first-year HLS students in her Reading Group on the Law School’s connection to New England’s slavery heritage to visit the Royall House and Slave Quarters in Medford, Massachusetts.

Harvard Professor Oliver Hart, a co-winner of this year’s Nobel Prize in Economics, has been a key participant in Harvard Law School’s program in law and economics for 25 years.

Since 2001, a select group of Harvard Law School students have undertaken public service internships under the auspices of the Chayes International Public Service Fellowship. Chayes Fellows spend eight weeks working within the governments of developing nations, or with the inter-governmental and non-governmental organizations that support them.

In October, on the occasion of her appointment as the Touoff-Glueck Professor of Law, Professor Adriaan Lanni delivered a lecture titled, “Why Study Athenian Law? Adventures in Institutional Design.”