Today Posts

For a young law student arriving at Harvard Law School in the fall of 1988, Morton Horwitz [’67] seemed to encapsulate everything that I (no doubt, naively) expected to see in a Harvard professor. Among the students, he was widely known as “Mort the Tort,” for the passion that he brought to the class with which he was most widely identified.

The Board of Veterans’ Appeals of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs denies a soldier’s claim for disability benefits for an injury that occurred while he was on active duty. But the decision is handed down while the soldier is redeployed to Afghanistan, and he doesn’t realize he has the right to appeal until after he returns stateside—after the appeal deadline has passed. For students in HLS’s new Veterans Legal Clinic, the chance to work on this case and others like it is eye-opening.

Ernest Shackleton’s first journey to the Antarctic in the early 1900s ended in a very public failure. On his second journey, in a race to the South Pole, he turned back within 100 miles of his goal. In his third expedition, not only did he fail to traverse Antarctica, but his ship was destroyed by ice, stranding the crew on ice floes for more than a year. So why do law and business students and executives in legal and business organizations study Shackleton as an example of successful leadership?

Stephanie Atwood ’13 started her 3L year several days early in a basement classroom of Wasserstein Hall in a new intensive “boot camp” on accounting and finance. In just three days, Atwood and 44 classmates learned a credit’s worth of previously foreign-sounding concepts such as internal rate of return and the cost of capital.

When Harvard Law Professor Daniel Meltzer ’75 was named director of the American Law Institute in January, he joined a long line of members of the HLS community who have helped shape the direction of the law from inside the ALI.

“Mutual aid” may not be the first phrase that comes to mind in connection with law schools and lawyers, yet consider these examples. Harvard Law School’s Professor Jonathan Zittrain ’95 created a course joining HLS students with Stanford Law School students to brainstorm “Ideas for a Better Internet.” One student group tackled Internet security at Facebook, whose 1 billion users experience about 5 percent of all phishing attempts—600,000 of which succeed every day in locking users out of their accounts and compromising their personal data, including photos. The students developed an idea for improving security: allow a “cabinet” of friends to help reset a compromised account, instead of going through customer service, which has been chronically (and understandably) overloaded. The students presented the idea to Facebook—and the public—in J-term 2011, and on May 1, 2013, Facebook implemented a feature that resembled it. The approach deploys mutual aid of trusted friends—identified by each user—to veto suspicious activity. It improves on-the-ground user privacy and security without relying upon traditional regulatory approaches.

The CEO of TIAA-CREF and former vice chair of the board of governors of the Federal Reserve talks about his dreams—and the reality of helping others realize theirs.

CopyrightX, the new, experimental, Web-based Harvard Law School course which prioritizes the human dimension of online teaching, is the brainchild of Professor Terry Fisher, who is committed to what he calls the democratization of higher education.

As Americans travel to other countries for medical care, Professor Glenn Cohen looks at the implications at home and abroad.

In the fall of 2009, Professor Cass R. Sunstein, left HLS to serve as the administrator at the helm of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, joining a humming warren of executive branch experts in trade, health, economics, science and other specialties.

On May 30th, Shannon Liss-Riordan ’96 opened The Just Crust, a worker-owned pizza restaurant that came as a result of a class-action lawsuit against Boston chain, The Upper Crust Pizzeria. Liss-Riordan is hoping to turn the infamous case accusing the pizza chain of stealing workers’ wages into an example of how giving employees a voice can be both fulfilling and profitable.

Many for-profit colleges, which get the overwhelming majority of their revenues from federal financial aid programs, rely on high-pressure tactics and false employment and salary guarantees to lure students into taking out loans. Now, through the efforts of Harvard Law School alum Toby Merrill ’11, some of the victims of these practices can get free legal aid to enforce their rights.

If you really want to improve your legal writing, says Harvard Law School alum Mark Yohalem '05, try writing a video game. A prosecutor at the U.S. attorney’s office in Los Angeles with a Supreme Court clerkship under his belt, Yohalem has written more than 20 short stories and seven computer games in his free time.

As a deaf-blind student with very limited sight and hearing, Haben Girma '13 learned that you must be a self-advocate and come up with creative solutions to the problems you face. If that fails, she says, then the law can be a strong ally.

In her essay “Invisible Threats,” Harvard Law Professor Gabriella Blum LL.M. ’01 S.J.D. ’03 builds on themes from a joint book project with Benjamin Wittes of the Brookings Institution.

Nancy-Ann DeParle, director of the White House Office of Health Reform from 2009 to 2011, answers questions about the Affordable Care Act.

When you next have a free moment online, visit the Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. Digital Suite, launched by the Harvard Law School Library early…

Many Harvard Law School alumni have been extraordinarily successful, many have lived unusual lives, and not a few have done both—including Morgan Chu ’76, one of the most successful IP lawyers in the world, who, along with his wife, Helen, is endowing in perpetuity the dean’s chair at HLS. Dean Martha Minow will be honored as the inaugural Morgan and Helen Chu Dean’s Professor.

Alex Whiting, who currently serves as the prosecution coordinator in the Office of the Prosecutor at the International Criminal Court, will rejoin the Harvard Law School faculty this July as a professor of practice. Whiting previously taught at HLS as an assistant clinical professor.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled this week on several major cases including United States v. Windsor and Hollingsworth v. Perry in regard to same-sex marriage, Fisher v. University of Texas on Affirmative Action, and Shelby County v. Holder, which concerned the Voting Rights Act of 1965. A number of HLS faculty shared their opinions of the rulings on the radio, television, on the web and in print.