Today Posts

With a mixture of storytelling about his groundbreaking role in amateur basketball and critiques of the NCAA and NBA, former sports marketing executive Sonny Vaccaro gave the keynote address at the third annual HLS Sports Law Symposium on March 25.

In a Mar. 28 panel discussion moderated by Harvard Law School lecturer and former Maine Attorney General Jim Tierney, Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley and Connecticut Attorney General George Jepsen ’80 sat down with HLS students to discuss challenges they face in office.

Speaking to students at a lecture sponsored by the Harvard Law School Advocates for Human Rights on March 9, Nobel Peace Prize nominee Dr. Gene Sharp discussed various elements of an effective nonviolent struggle and addressed the recent demonstrations in the Middle East in light of his research.

At a recent lecture hosted by HLS Lambda and the Journal of Law & Technology, Harvard Law School’s Henry N. Ess Professor of Law John Palfrey discussed the latest legal and legislative attempts to address cyber-bullying—or, as Palfrey prefers to describe it, bullying in the digital era.

Daniel Ellsberg, the former military analyst responsible for leaking the Pentagon Papers in 1971, addressed a Harvard Law School audience last week in a discussion of WikiLeaks, the organization that publishes classified documents submitted by whistleblowers worldwide. Once called “the most dangerous man in America,” Ellsberg, who will turn 80 on April 7, engaged in a dialog with Scott Horton, a lecturer at Columbia Law School, about why states keep secrets and the consequences of this secrecy.

The following op-ed by HLS Professor Alan Dershowitz “Norway to Jews: You’re Not Welcome Here,” appeared in the March 29, 2011 edition of the Wall Street Journal. He is the author of numerous books, including “The Trials of Zion,” “The Case for Moral Clarity: Israel, Hamas and Gaza,” and “Finding, Framing, and Hanging Jefferson: A Lost Letter, a Remarkable Discovery, and Freedom of Speech in an Age of Terrorism.”

Harvard Law School Professor Noah Feldman explained aspects of Sharia and Islam Law on a television program -- "Unwelcome: The Muslims Next Door" -- for CNN's In America series.The segment, which examines a Tennessee city torn apart as residents fight to block the construction of a large Islamic center, is part of a broadcast that will air on Saturday, April 2 at 8:00 p.m.

In a New York Times op-ed about the challenge to Arizona’s public financing scheme currently pending in the Supreme Court, Harvard Law School Professor Charles Fried and co-author Cliff Sloan '84 write: “The [Arizona] law simply ensures that, when a candidate relying on private money speaks, the publicly financed candidate has the money to answer.” The op-ed—“Free Speech Worth Paying For”—appeared in the March 26, 2011 edition of The New York Times.

Debating what Harvard Law School Dean Martha Minow called “one of the most important public policy issues and one of the most important constitutional issues,” three law professors offered different perspectives on whether the individual mandate portion of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) violates the commerce clause of the Constitution and infringes on personal liberties.

Following a vote of the Harvard Law School faculty, Gabriella Blum LL.M. '01 S.J.D. '03, a specialist in the laws of war and conflict resolution, has been promoted from assistant professor to professor of law—a tenured faculty position.

The New York Times published an editorial appreciation of the late William J. Stuntz of the Harvard Law School faculty, on March 23.

In a recent op-ed in Slate, Professor Jack Goldsmith makes the case for why President Obama's campaign of air and sea strikes against Libya is constitutional.  Goldsmith says that while he agrees with "many of the arguments from critics of the intervention that  President Obama acted imprudently in committing American forces to a conflict with an ill-defined national security justification,"  he does not believe that the military action is unconstitutional. Goldsmith's op-ed, "War Power," appeared in the March 21, 2011 edition of Slate. A former assistant attorney general in the Bush Administration, Goldsmith is the author of "The Terror Presidency: Law and Judgement Inside the Bush Administration" (New York : W.W. Norton & Company 2007).

Harvard Law School Professor Hal Scott’s Program on International Financial Systems is hosting the 9th annual “Symposium on Building the Financial System of the Twenty-first Century: An Agenda for Europe and the United States” this weekend in Hampshire, England.  Co-hosted by the Centre for European Policy Studies, the event will gather more than 100 senior executives and government officials from the financial industry, policymaking arenas, law, and academia.  

“In his State of the Union speech last month, President Obama got one of his biggest laughs when he said that there are twelve different agencies that deal with exports, and at least five that deal with housing policy. Then there is my favorite example: the interior department is in charge of salmon while they’re in fresh water, but the commerce department handles them in saltwater. ‘I hear it gets even more complicated,’ and here he smirked, ‘once they’re smoked.’ All I could think was, this guy is stealing my chair talk!” With these words, Archibald Cox Professor of Law Jody Freeman L.L.M. ’91 introduced her lecture “Coordinating Agencies in Shared Regulatory Space,” in which she spoke about the problem of wasteful duplication in government agencies.

A conference last month at HLS, “The Psychology of Inequality,” presented by the Project on Law & Mind Sciences (PLMS), brought together scholars, law students, and others to examine inequality from the standpoint of the latest research in social science, health science, and mind science, and to reflect on the implications of their findings for law.

Harvard Law School Professor Laurence H. Tribe ’66 will receive an honorary doctorate on March 29 from Mexico’s Instituto Nacional de Ciencias Penales (INACIPE), or National Institute of Criminal Science. He will be the first American to receive the annual “honoris causa” doctorate since its inception in 1998.

On March 14, the Library Journal announced 50 new inductees to their Movers & Shakers list, including John Palfrey ’01. Movers & Shakers is a distinguished annual award given to those who are shaping the future of libraries and communities across the United States.

On February 25, Unbound: Harvard Journal of the Legal Left presented “Local 1330 v. U.S. Steel: 30 Years Later.” Conference organizers chose to focus on Local 1330 because the case demonstrates that workers can be treated as collateral damage in the corporate quest for greater profits. Co-moderator Harris Freeman, Western New England College of Law professor, said that its lessons are particularly relevant today as labor unions and fundamental workers’ rights are being challenged in Wisconsin and face similar risks in other states. The conference was also moderated by Temple University Beasley School of Law professor Brishen Rogers and SEIU Law Fellow Lela Klein.

Jacob E. Gersen, a leading expert in administrative law, legislation and constitutional theory, will join the Harvard Law School faculty as a tenured Professor of Law this summer. He is currently on the faculty of the University of Chicago Law School, where he teaches environmental law, administrative law, legislation, executive branch design and torts.