Today Posts

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.

Harvard Law School welcomed Kamla Persad-Bissessar, the Prime Minster of Trinidad and Tobago this month for a lecture on leadership and cooperation. Persad-Bissessar became the first female prime minister of the Caribbean nation in May, and was named one of the top 10 female world leaders by TIME Magazine in August.

Beginning in 2013, Harvard Law School’s new Public Service Venture Fund will provide $1 million per year in grants to support new and recent graduates who will be working for public service employers, and also to support those who want to start their own organizations. With this commitment, the School is enhancing its focus on entrepreneurship in general and social entrepreneurship specifically—to encourage current students to pursue their own ideas and to prepare students who might want to apply for support from the fund and other sources of assistance for public service enterprises.

In an op-ed in the New York Times, HLS Professor Noah Feldman discusses the challenges and opportunities President Barack Obama faces, after the midterm elections, to have an impact internationally.  He writes: "To achieve more tangible foreign-policy results will require focusing on a familiar, thorny problem: the Middle East, where the Obama administration has already begun to engage." Feldman's op-ed, "Midterm Maneuvers," appeared in the Nov. 21, 2010 edition of the New York Times Magazine.

In his essays, Samuel Moyn considers topics such as human rights and the Holocaust, international courts, and liberal internationalism. Skeptical of humanitarian justifications for intervention, he writes,“[H]uman rights history should turn away from ransacking the past as if it provided good support for the astonishingly specific international movement of the last few decades.”

Harvard Law School Professor Jack Goldsmith co-wrote an op-ed with Benjamin Wittes for the Nov. 19, 2010 edition of The Washington Post titled “Ghailani verdict makes stronger case for military detentions.” The piece addresses debate over the Obama administration’s policy to try former Guantanamo detainees in civilian court.

The Harvard Law School Library recently hosted Professors John Goldberg and Henry Smith for a discussion of their contributions to Oxford University Press’s new series, “Introductions to U.S. Law” (2010).

The final round of the annual Ames Moot Court Competition took place on November 16 in the Ames Courtroom.

Carl M. Loeb University Professor Laurence H. Tribe, currently serving as the first Senior Counselor for Access to Justice in the Justice Department, will return to the Harvard Law School faculty in January and resume teaching in the 2011-12 academic year.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr. ’79 presided over the final round of Harvard Law School’s 2010 Ames Moot Court Competition on Nov. 16 in Ames Courtroom. He was joined by Judge Julia Smith Gibbons of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit, and Judge Diana Murphy of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit.

During China’s Cultural Revolution, it could be deadly to admit you were a lawyer. Yet today, less than 40 years later, law is a huge…