Today Posts

As a little girl in Berkeley, Calif., U.S. Navy Lieutenant Commander Sylvaine Wong LL.M. ’11 became enamored of the Navy when her dad took her each year to “Fleet Week” to clamber aboard aircraft carriers and visit other military craft.

For the first three months his battalion was stationed in Al Anbar Province in Iraq in early 2007, the situation was “highly kinetic,” recalls U.S. Marine Captain Siddhartha Velandy LL.M. ’11, with the Marines either under relentless attack or aggressively patrolling in order to create a secure environment.

Steven Schartup ’13 in a U.S. Army veteran who did two tours of duty in Iraq, one involving combat, and another couple of months in Kosovo in a peacekeeping operation.

It was between his junior and senior years at Princeton, in the summer of 2004 when the war in Iraq was not very old, that Graham Phillips ’13 decided to enlist in the U.S. Army.

U.S. Navy Lieutenant Commander Susan McGarvey LL.M.’ 11 was in the courthouse when Saddam Hussein was on trial for the Anfal Campaign, the genocide of Kurds that he ordered in the late 1980s.

As a U.S. Army intelligence officer stationed in Baghdad in 2006 and 2007, Ian Gore ’13 was a targeting officer, responsible for building “target packets” against enemy combatants: working with locals to find out who the enemies were, compiling evidence against them, explaining to the unit commander why a particular person should be arrested and detained, and describing the goals that would be achieved.

Harvard Law School Dean Martha Minow said she set out to write a book that acknowledged the limitations but celebrated the achievements of the 1954 Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. The result was “In Brown’s Wake: Legacies of America’s Educational Landmark," which was the cornerstone of a two-panel discussion at Harvard on Dec. 4.

In a November lecture marking his appointment as the Henry N. Ess III Professor at Harvard Law School, Professor John G. Palfrey ’01 called for a new legal information system "grounded in a set of open data."

From helping to prosecute Saddam Hussein to targeting enemy combatants to prosecuting or defending other members of the service, seven active duty or military veterans served in the war efforts in Iraq, Afghanistan, or both, and have matriculated at HLS this year.

Harvard Law School became the first-ever repeat-winner of the National Puerto Rico Trial Advocacy Competition. Returning as defending champions, the Harvard Law School Trial Team advanced to the semi-finals with the highest score and remained undefeated throughout the competition, edging out Georgetown Law in the final round to win first place.

On Nov. 18, as part of the 2010 National Lawyers Convention in Washington, D.C., HLS Professor Chares Fried participated in a debate on the constitutionality of the federal health care legislation—the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act—signed into law by President Barack Obama ’91 last March.

On Dec. 3, an all-day conference marking the 40th anniversary of the Environmental Protection Agency's creation was held at Harvard Law School. EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson was the keynote speaker; also among the speakers and panelists was former Vice President Al Gore, who addressed the luncheon. The event was sponsored by the Law School, the Harvard Kennedy School, the Harvard School of Public Health, and the Harvard University Center for the Environment.

Harvard Law School Professor David Wilkins ‘80 delivered a lecture, “Making Global Lawyers: Legal Education, Legal Paradox, and the Paradox of Professional Distinctiveness” on Oct. 19th to mark his appointment as the Lester Kissel Professor of Law.

Sixteen teams from nine different law schools from throughout the Northeast took part in the ABA Regional Negotiation Competition held at Harvard Law School and organized by Harvard Negotiators on November 13–14, 2010. Approximately 35 judges, all practicing lawyers in the Boston area, evaluated the teams and chose the winners.

Top practitioners, heads of state, academics, and theoreticians in international development came together with more than 200 students and community members for “Rebuilding After the Storm: The Role of Law in Development Post Natural Disasters,” the HLS Law & International Development Society’s inaugural symposium, held on Nov. 19, 2010.

On Nov. 19, Harvard Law School  Professor Duncan Kennedy and Jeffrey Sachs, Columbia University professor and special adviser to the United Nations Secretary-General, discussed a new collection edited by HLS Professor Lucie White ’81 and Jeremy Perelman, S.J.D. ’11, before a large audience at HLS. That collection—“Stones of Hope: How African Activists Reclaim Human Rights to Challenge Global Poverty”—combines case studies from activists with theoretical essays on development to “tackle problems of disenfranchisement and poverty in the world,” said HLS Professor William Alford ’77, vice dean for the Graduate Program and International Legal Studies, who introduced the discussion of the book.

Hal S. Scott, the Nomura Professor and director of the Program on International Financial Systems at Harvard Law School and director of the Committee on Capital Markets Regulation, co-authored two letters to the Financial Stability Oversight Council on two provisions of the Dodd-Frank Act.

In an op-ed for Project Syndicate, "Pricing Corporate Governance," Harvard Law School Professor Lucian Bebchuk discusses how markets price the corporate-governance provisions of companies. He also details his findings from a recent study "Learning and the Disappearing Association between Governance and Returns"  with HLS Visiting Professor of Law Alma Cohen and HLS Lecturer in Law and Economics Charles C.Y. Wang. Bebchuk is director of the Corporate Governance Program at Harvard Law School. He is co-author, with Holger Spamann, of "Regulating Bankers’ Pay."

As part of the Views from Washington series, Julius Genachowski,’91, Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, came to Harvard Law School in November for a conversation with students and with Dean Martha Minow.