Today Posts

In response to a widely perceived dysfunctional political environment in Washington, D.C., attendees at a conference at Harvard Law School evaluated the potential and pitfalls of a possible remedy—a first-ever Article V convention to propose amendments to the Constitution.

On September 28, the Harvard Law School Environmental Law Program and Environmental Law Institute hosted a Supreme Court Review and Preview to discuss the implications of recent Supreme Court decisions on the field of environmental law. Harvard Law School Dean Martha Minow introduced the event, and emphasized the Supreme Court’s role in the formation of environmental policy in the United States.

Eugene Volokh, professor at UCLA School of Law, well known to some law students for his blog, The Volokh Conspiracy, gave a lecture on slippery slope arguments at an event sponsored by the Harvard Law School Federalist Society on September 20th.  He was joined by Noah Feldman, Bemis Professor of International Law at Harvard Law School, who provided a response.

In the first lecture of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics series, Paul Thacker, an investigative journalist and former U.S. Senate Finance Committee staffer, said that big pharmaceutical dollars not only own physicians but also many prominent medical school faculty who are paid to lobby for drugs.

Harvard Law School was founded with a bequest from Isaac Royall, a brutal slave owner. Two centuries later, the first black President of the U.S. and first black First Lady are HLS alumni.

Seven hundred alumni and guests gathered in Cambridge on September 16-18 to commemorate the 3rd Celebration of Black Alumni at Harvard Law School. With more black lawyers entering the profession than ever before—and more achieving positions of prominence and power, the event, “Struggle and Progress: Leadership in the 21st Century,” focused on the progress that has been made and the barriers that remain.

Harvard Law School commemorated the 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks with a two-day conference of top-level advisers and experts to elucidate the changing legal landscape in the battle against terrorism. "Law, Security and Liberty post-9/11," was held Sept. 16 and 17, and marked the launch of the new Harvard Law School-Brookings Project on Law and Security, a joint venture of HLS and the Brookings Institution.

In celebration of Constitution Day—the annual celebration of the signing of the U.S. Constitution on Sept. 17, 1787—HLS professors Noah Feldman and John Palfrey delivered talks to university audiences about the document upon which the American legal and political systems have been built.

An essay, Why Death Penalty Opponents Are Closer to Their Goal Than They Realize, by HLS Professor Carol Steiker ’86, appeared in the Sept. 27 edition of The New Republic. The essay focuses on the decline of the death penalty in practice, politics and law, and how the present moment brings the genuine possibility of permanent abolition via judicial decision.

At the 2011 annual meeting of the International Corporate Governance Network held in Paris, Professor Lucian Bebchuk was awarded an ICGN award for excellence in corporate governance. ICGN awards are given annually in recognition of “exceptional achievements in the corporate governance field.”

President Obama’s top counterterrorism adviser, John O. Brennan, told conferees in a keynote address at HLS on Sept. 16 that the U.S. must not let down its guard in fighting terrorist organizations on a broad front. Brennan’s remarks, “Strengthening our Security by Adhering to our Values and Laws,” were delivered as part of a two-day conference on terrorism and national security, "Law, Security, and Liberty after 9/11: Looking to the Future," hosted by the newly-inaugurated Harvard Law School-Brookings Project on Law and Security.

Will knowledge, information, and communication workers of the world unite? This question was explored by Vincent Mosco, professor emeritus of communications at Queen's University, Canada, at a presentation sponsored by the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School on September 19.

Before an overflow crowd of students and faculty in the Ames Courtroom, U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Elena Kagan ’86 and HLS Dean Martha Minow engaged in a wide-ranging conversation about the current high court, Kagan’s storied career, and other issues during the Honorable S. William Green Lecture in Public Law, established by Patricia Freiberg Green in honor of her husband Congressman Bill Green ‘53.

For upholding the highest principles of the legal profession and for outstanding dedication to the welfare of others, HLS Clinical Professor Deborah Anker LL.M. ’84 was recently elected to the Fellows of the American Bar Foundation. Anker, one of the nation’s top scholars in immigration law, is director of the Harvard Immigration and Refugee Clinic and has taught immigration law and supervised clinical students for over 20 years.

The Situationist blog, established by Professor Jon Hanson and run by the Project on Law and Mind Science at Harvard Law School, recently received the 2011 Media Prize awarded by the Society for Personality and Social Psychology.

Michael Chertoff had a common reaction to the news of a plane hitting one of the World Trade Center towers in New York City on Sept. 11, 2001. “Like many people at the time, I thought it was a pilot error,” the former U.S. secretary of Homeland Security told a lunchtime crowd at Harvard Law School on Tuesday.

In 1961, Newton Minow – then Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission – delivered a landmark speech to the National Association of Broadcasters on “Television and the Public Interest,” in which he described television programming as a "vast wasteland" and advocated for public interest programming. He challenged his audience “to sit down in front of your own television set when your station goes on the air and stay there, for a day, without a book, without a magazine, without a newspaper…to distract you. Keep your eyes glued to that set until the station signs off. I can assure you that what you will observe is a vast wasteland.” Fifty years– and innumerable advances in media communications – later, Minow visited Harvard Law School for a forum exploring the future of journalism and the role of the state in the construction of the public sphere.

In a recent review in the New Republic, HLS Professor Adrian Vermeule ’93 examines the book "The Body of John Merryman: Abraham Lincoln and the Suspension of Habeas Corpus" (Harvard University Press, 2011) by Brian McGinty.

The Harvard Law School community commemorated the 10th anniversary of September 11th with a vigil on Sunday, September 11 at 8:30pm on Jarvis Field. Hosted by Harvard Law School Dean Martha Minow, it was a moment for students, faculty and staff to come together and reflect on the events of that day and the years that followed.

The only way we can keep Americans fully employed and maintain our global lead is by constantly improving their productivity and skills, writes Vivek Wadhwa, a senior research associate for the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School, in an op-ed in today's Washington Post. In his op-ed,  "On jobs, Obama needs to be a radical," published on the eve on the president's address to the nation, Wadhwa writes that American companies must be provided with the incentives to invest in their workers as they used to.