Today Posts

On February 3, the Harvard Women’s Law Association held its 6th annual conference. This year’s conference, entitled “Mind the Gap: Achieving Actual Parity,” was an open forum about achieving equality in the courtroom, workplace, and community. Kamala Harris, Attorney General of California, delivered the keynote address. 

Whether owners of limited liability companies should be subject to personal liability has been the subject of much controversy lately, in the U.S. and around the world. On Jan. 25, Bruno Salama, spoke to an HLS audience on the topic in the context of his research project and book “The End of Limited Liability in Brazil” tracing the status of corporate limited liability and veil piercing in Brazil. A professor of law at the Fundação Getulio Vargas in Sao Paulo, Salama was joined by HLS Professors Reinier Kraakman and Mark Roe ’75 at an event organized by the Harvard Law School Brazilian Studies Association.

Deans representing law schools in China, Brazil, Canada, and France gathered at Harvard Law School on Friday to discuss the pressures facing law schools to reform curricula in response to globalization.

The Harvard Law Review has elected Conor Tochilin ’13 as its 126th president. Tochilin succeeds Mitchell Reich ’12.

There are two things former U.S. Solicitor General Paul Clement ’92 won’t do: Tell you where he stands on same-sex marriage, and grouse about the controversy that enveloped him last spring when he resigned from his law firm in order to continue defending U.S. House of Representatives Republicans in litigation over the Defense of Marriage Act.

A new study produced by Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society and the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project, in partnership with the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and the Give Foundation, examines a new cohort of charitable givers—those who make donations via text message from their cellphones.

The celebration of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day at Harvard Law School on Monday, Jan. 23 included a panel moderated by Harvard Law School Clinical Professor Ronald Sullivan ’94, and featuring Harvard Medical School Professor Allen Counter and Preston Williams, a theology professor at Harvard Divinity School. Students from across the University, including students from the Medical School, the Divinity School, the Kennedy School, the Business School, and Harvard College attended the celebration.

For the last several years, former Harvard Law School Dean Robert C. Clark ’72 has broken with tradition in teaching his mergers and acquisitions course. It isn’t enough to read leading cases, he realized; students still may leave the classroom without any real understanding of how to structure a deal, identify and avoid pitfalls, and recognize why personalities matter—in short, how M&As work in the real world.

HLS Professor Charles Fried was counsel of record in an amicus brief filed on Jan. 13 with the Supreme Court on behalf of 104 health law professors supporting the constitutionality of the insurance mandate in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, which will be challenged before the Supreme Court in Department of Health and Human Services v. State of Florida in March.

Robert Anderson, Harvard Law Oneida Indian Nation Visiting Professor of Law, was named to serve on a national commission that will evaluate the management and administration of nearly $4 billion in Native American trust funds and associated assets by the U.S. Department of the Interior. Anderson is a member of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe.    

Harvard Law School’s faculty and fellows earned the top ranking for the total number of citations of their work on the Social Science Research Network (SSRN), according to cumulative statistics released for 2011. HLS faculty members captured five out of the top 10 slots – including the number one slot – among law school faculty in all legal fields.

Harvard Law School and Stanford Law School co-hosted the fourth annual Harvard-Stanford International Junior Faculty Forum (IJFF) in November, bringing 11 of the world’s most innovative junior legal scholars from around the world to present their work. This year’s forum was held at HLS.

HLS Professor Adrian Vermeule ’93, one of the leading scholars of public law and constitutional theory, will participate in a program focused on his new book “The System of the Constitution” (Oxford University Press, 2011) at University College in London on Friday, Jan. 13.

In December, Harvard Law School’s International Human Rights Clinic submitted an amicus curiae brief to the U.S. Supreme Court in support of petitioners in a major Alien Tort Statute (“ATS”) case, Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum Co. The brief in Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum Co. argues that corporations can be held liable for violations of the law of nations under the ATS.

Harvard Law School Professor Duncan Kennedy, whose scholarship has focused on juridical thought, economic analysis of the law, the links between law and literary theory, and legal globalization, has become the first law professor to receive an honorary doctorate from Sciences Po in Paris.

The United States is experiencing “an environmental law-making crisis,” said Harvard Law School Professor Richard Lazarus at “Harvard Thinks Green,” an environmental sustainability event held at Harvard in December. The event was co-hosted by Harvard Thinks Big, the Office for Sustainability and the Center for the Environment at Harvard University.

By the time Tope Lawani ’95 started law school, he knew he would not likely spend his career practicing law. Already the impact of his Nigerian childhood and a captivation with investment markets had planted the seed of an idea that would eventually pull him back to his homeland in hopes of reaping great returns for investors—and for Africa itself.

The third Celebration of Black Alumni drew more than 700 graduates to the school in September and filled the campus with excitement and engagement, crossing generations. The Bulletin interviewed participants who graduated during each of the past five decades. They reflect on their own experiences and the path of social change in the era of the nation’s first black president.

On Aug. 25, Benjamin B. Ferencz ’43, who served as a chief prosecutor in the Nuremberg Trials, made the concluding remarks for the prosecution in the International Criminal Court’s first case.