Today Posts

The American Bar Association has selected HLS Professor Noah Feldman’s “Scorpions: The Battles and Triumphs of FDR's Great Supreme Court Justices” (Twelve, 2010) to receive its 2011 Silver Gavel Award for Books. The group biography of Felix Frankfurter LL.B. 1906, Robert Jackson, Hugo Black and William O. Douglas explores the justices’ contentious relationship and their effect on 20th century constitutional law.

Army Brigadier General Mark Martins ’90 accepted the Medal of Freedom, the highest honor conferred by Harvard Law School, and gave the inaugural Dean’s Distinguished Lecture on April 18 at HLS.

The Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard helped shape the agenda of Rethink Music, a recent conference that brought together legal, business, and academic experts to discuss new business models for creating and distributing music.

Harvard Law School Distinguished Senior Fellow Ben W. Heineman, Jr., Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court Elena Kagan ’86 and Princeton University Professor Anne-Marie Slaughter '85 are among the new class of members elected to the American Philosophical Society this year.

The United States cannot afford to allow ongoing legal ambiguities to compromise the vast potential of stem-cell research, yet the struggle over federal funding for research involving human embryonic stem cells may well be waged for years to come, write Harvard Law School Assistant Professor I. Glenn Cohen and Dr. Eli Y. Adashi in an article published by the New England Journal of Medicine on May 18.

Adrienne Bradley ’12 was named one of Latham & Watkins' 2011 Diversity Scholars in April. The Diversity Scholars initiative awards $10,000 scholarships to four second-year law students in the United States who intend to practice law in a global firm. The program is one of several firm initiatives designed to promote diversity and equal opportunity in the legal profession.

Mihir A. Desai, who currently serves as the Mizuho Financial Group Professor of Finance, the Senior Associate Dean for Planning and University Affairs, and the Chair of Doctoral Programs at Harvard Business School, has accepted a joint appointment to the faculty of Harvard Law School as a tenured Professor of Law.

In April, Harvard Law School participated in festivities commemorating Earth Month at Harvard, an inaugural initiative featuring university-wide events and activities to celebrate and raise awareness about environmental issues.  

On an early morning in January, eight upper-year Harvard Law School students landed on the lone runway at the sleepy international airport in Lesotho where they were warmly welcomed by officials from the U.S. Embassy and the U.S. government’s Millennium Challenge Corporation (“MCC”), an innovative U.S. government foreign assistance agency.

At an event hosted by the Harvard Women’s Law Association on April 19, 2011, Joseph M. Sellers, head of the Civil Rights and Employment practice group at Cohen Milstein, shared his experience working on Dukes v. Wal-Mart Stores, the largest civil rights class action suit in the United States.

In light of the recent controversy over President Barack Obama’s birth certificate, Harvard Law School Professor Randall Kennedy espouses his views on the subject in the May 12 edition of The New Republic online.

This year, the Harvard Mediation Program (HMP) (a Student Practice Organization) celebrates its 30th anniversary of training students and community volunteers to mediate disputes in small claims court and other settings.

In 2006, a series of coordinated uprisings in 74 detention centers and attacks on police stations and public buildings left 43 state officials and hundreds of civilians dead and brought São Paulo—South America’s largest city and financial capital—to a standstill. Harvard Law School’s International Human Rights Clinic and the leading Brazilian human rights group Justiça Global have now released a comprehensive study of the attacks.

In an op-ed published in The Huffington Post on May 5, Harvard Law School professor Alan M. Dershowitz assessed the decision made by the Obama administration not to release photographs of Osama bin Laden’s dead body for public scrutiny. 

Harvard Law School Professor Philip Heymann contends that the crisis in Mexico involving drug cartels needs to be examined from the broader perspective of organized crime and its use of violence—not just as a drug-trafficking issue. For the second year in a row, a working group was assembled to take the next step of addressing the issues in very concrete detail. About 30 law-enforcement officials, prosecutors, investigators, legal scholars and proponents of treatment and prevention were in attendance.

In the Washington Post ‘Opinions’ section on May 5, Harvard Law School Professor Charles Fried and his son, Suffolk University Philosophy Department Chair Gregory Fried, discussed the killing of Osama bin Laden. The authors argued that torture apologists are undermining what the pair call a “great victory” for the U.S. by calling into question the circumstances under which bin Laden was felled during the firefight in his compound in Pakistan—a “risible” notion, by the authors’ standards.

Last month, Andrew Childers ’11 received a 2011 Law Student Ethics Award from the Association of Corporate Counsel—Northeast Chapter. Childers and 10 other students from area law schools were lauded for upholding the highest ethical standards of the legal profession as student lawyers.

Harvard Law School Professor Yochai Benkler ‘94 has received a Ford Foundation Visionaries Award, it was announced April 29. The award was created in recognition of the 75th Anniversary of the Ford Foundation to celebrate social innovators from a variety of fields.