Today Posts

As two HLS graduates are vying to lead the United States, we asked six legal historians on the faculty to reflect on the connections between legal education and leadership.

Barry Volpert J.D./M.B.A. ’85 is chief executive officer of Crestview Partners, a private equity firm he co-founded in 2004 after retiring from Goldman Sachs, where he was head of the Merchant Banking Division in Europe. Based in New York City, Crestview has about $4 billion in assets under management. "We like to focus on complex and difficult situations," he says, "that many other private equity firms tend to avoid."

In October 1962, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke at Harvard Law School on “The Future of Integration.” It was six months before he would be imprisoned in a Birmingham jail, 10 months before the March on Washington, almost two years before the signing of the Civil Rights Act and almost six years before his assassination. “It may be that the law cannot make a man love me,” he said, “but it can keep him from lynching me.”

“Client Science: Advice for Lawyers on Counseling Clients through Bad News and Other Legal Realities,” by Marjorie Corman Aaron ’81 (Oxford). No one likes to deliver bad news—attorneys included. But oftentimes providing honest and difficult advice is a crucial part of the job, and Aaron offers her own advice on how best to do it.

Steven R. Shapiro ’75 has been legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union since 1993, contributing to more than 200 U.S. Supreme Court briefs and working on a range of cases. The Bulletin spoke with Shapiro about his time at the 92-year-old ACLU and his take on the state of freedom in the United States.

After the release of her article “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All,” Anne-Marie Slaughter ’85 was engulfed in what she calls a “tsunami” of her own making.

Entrepreneurs, as management guru Peter Drucker has written, “create something new, something different; they change or transmute values.” That’s not easy to do, as two Harvard Law grads—one just embarking on a new startup, the other working to build a business he developed—can attest. But they also can speak to the excitement of seeing a need and seeking to fill it, and doing it in a way that has never been done before.

Not every U.S. Supreme Court decision is awaited by a breathless nation. But when an issue strikes fire with the greater populace, those tasked with covering the high court had better get it right. When the justices ruled on President Obama’s health care law this summer, Greg Stohr was first, and Greg Stohr was right.

June 8, 2012, was a particularly busy day for Ronald Machen Jr. ’94, U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia. U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder named Machen to oversee investigations into the leaking of national security secrets to the press. In D.C. Superior Court, 71 defendants made their first appearances on charges that ranged from assault with the intent to murder, to sexual abuse and numerous drug crimes. Machen also held a press conference to announce guilty pleas made by former D.C. City Council Chair Kwame Brown, for bank fraud and campaign finance violations.

Barrister and writer Sadakat Kadri LL.M. ’89 is author of "Heaven on Earth," an exploration of Shariah law that begins with deep history (in ancient Arabia) and closes with contemporary reality: the varieties of present-day Islamic jurisprudence, gleaned from his travels to India, Pakistan, Syria, Egypt and Turkey.

A Q&A with Sadakat Kadri LL.M. ’89, author of “Heaven on Earth”

A run for state office by a student committed to public service

U.S. Senate candidate Ted Cruz calls for a “return to the framers’ vision of a constitutionally limited government”

Digitized materials give new perspective on a storied figure Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story not only became Dane Professor at Harvard Law School while serving…

Donna Levin ’83 writes that she “abandoned the tranquillity of life as a litigator to join the fast-paced world of crossword construction.” This is her first puzzle for the Harvard Law Bulletin, but since 2005, approximately 250 of her puzzles have been published by major newspapers around the country.

It is the spring of 1997 and I am sitting in Pound 107 while Roger Fisher ’48, Williston Professor of Law, Emeritus, is telling a story about his serving as a weather reconnaissance pilot in World War II. As a teaching assistant for the Negotiation Workshop, I have heard the story at least a dozen times by now and feel my mind wandering. And yet, against my will, as the story reaches its crescendo and the combination punch line/negotiation lesson flows from Roger’s lips, I find myself involuntarily leaning forward and, a second later, helplessly bursting into laughter. The note I jot down to myself is: “All of life is about who tells better stories.”

Michael Klarman’s scholarship has focused on the effect that court rulings have on social reform movements. He argues that when courts get ahead of public opinion, political backlash often follows. That’s what he found in an earlier book he wrote on race and the U.S. Supreme Court, and it is a phenomenon he has also observed in cases involving the death penalty and abortion.mIn his new book, “From the Closet to the Altar: Courts, Backlash, and the Struggle for Same-Sex Marriage” (Oxford), the HLS professor explores whether the same effect has taken place when it comes to same-sex marriage litigation.

Professor Einer Elhauge ’86 is author of the e-book “Obamacare On Trial” (Edward Elgar), focused on the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act case decided by the Supreme Court in June. Elhauge raises points that were not aired in the courtroom, including the fact that the constitutional framers themselves had approved mandates to buy health insurance.

The highly connected nature of today’s world has all sorts of benefits—but all sorts of potential costs as well, from loss of control of private data to a world financial system so intertwined that when one part of it falls, it’s hard to keep other parts from toppling along with it. In “Interop: The Promise and Perils of Highly Interconnected Systems,” John Palfrey ’01 and Urs Gasser LL.M. ’03 draw on their work at the HLS Berkman Center for Internet & Society to start developing a “normative theory identifying what we want out of all this connectivity.”

Why do many law school graduates become leaders? Individuals with legal training lead government, business, civic activities, and nonprofit organizations in the United States and around the world. Of course, leaders of law firms, law schools, and offices of government lawyers have legal training, but often so do leaders of companies, universities and countries. I think that a combination of self-selection, features of the law school experience, and particular elements of law itself contributes to the sizable presence across society of lawyers as leaders—and as effective ones, at that. Does this seem right to you? I offer these thoughts in hopes of prompting your suggestions.