Today Posts

Throughout his career, James O. Bass Sr. '34 has engendered confidence in leadership circles as the ultimate counselor.

On the stage of the Democratic National Convention, one Gold Star father invoked the words of the Founding Fathers, and just like that, a Pakistani-born Muslim American lawyer inspired more Americans to buy pocket U.S. Constitutions from Amazon than ever before. His life has not been the same since.

As the new Harvard Law School Association president, Peter C. Krause ’74 has set a goal to engage international alumni across the globe.

Carol Wang ’13 spent two years before law school crisscrossing Afghanistan helping nascent small businesses. Now, she and three military veterans who served there are building their own small business designed to boost the nation’s long-troubled economy.

Terry Franklin ’89, a trusts and estates litigator, knows the importance of wills to those left behind. Recently he has focused on a will executed 170 years ago with enormous bearing on his ancestors’ survival and his own existence.

Harvard Law Professor Samuel Moyn ’01 discusses the potential and the limitations of the human rights movement when it comes to creating just societies.

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.