Today Posts

There are now 16 clinics at HLS, enabling students to do fieldwork at home and abroad. Here are stories from three of them, taking students inside inner cities and inner sanctums.

Some say the Clinton-Obama fight reflects a historical tension between blacks and women in the struggle for equality. A legal historian says the truth is not so simple—and far more interesting.

Proliferating programs, for getting out in the field

Last week, five current Harvard Law School students who have served or are currently serving in the U.S. armed forces spoke to a packed audience about their experiences in Iraq. Panelists Robert Merrill '08, Geoff Orazem '09, Erik Swabb '09, Hagan Scotten '10, and Kurt White '10 each drew upon their varied military posts during the invasion, the Second Battle of Fallujah, and counterinsurgency operations, to explain what it is like to serve as a junior officer in Iraq.

In rural Liberia, locals have a method for determining if someone is guilty of witchcraft. They administer poison to the suspect. If he survives, he’s innocent. That’s the sort of anachronism that vexes Deborah Isser ’96, a senior program officer at the U.S. Institute of Peace.

Harvard Law grads share prestigious Gruber Foundation Prize for International Justice

Robert B. Zoellick ’81, president of the World Bank Group, was recently on the law school campus to receive the HLS Association Award in recognition of his leadership and dedication to public service.

John Matteson ’86 is one of eight writers selected to win the 2008 Pulitzer Prize in Letters, Drama and Music. An associate professor of English at John Jay College, Matteson was recognized for his biography, “Eden’s Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father.”

When Becca O’Brien ’05 and Ommeed Sathe ’06 returned to HLS last October to talk about building partnerships in post-Katrina New Orleans, they gave a painstaking account of what should, but doesn’t, work.

Nationwide, only 24 percent of all judgeships are held by women. In federal courts, women make up barely 20 percent of the bench. Massachusetts Appeals Court Judge Fernande “Nan” Duffly ’78 wants to see these numbers rise and is passionate about making it happen.

Last summer, in South Dakota, when Steve Emery ’89 was made chief of the Prairie Dwelling Lakota, he was given the name Naca Wamni Omni (Chief Whirlwind). The name was meant to reflect his power with words, and the honor was the culmination of a career spent advocating for the sovereignty of his people—a mission he has shared with his brother, Mark Van Norman ’86.

Deborah Anker, director of the HLS Immigration and Refugee Clinical Program and a clinical professor of law, received the Elmer Fried Award for Excellence in Teaching on June 28 at the annual meeting of the American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA) in Vancouver.

Often, there’s a bond between the donor of a new chair and the scholar who occupies it.

The past five years have brought remarkable growth and change to Harvard Law School. Here, the Bulletin takes a time-out for a brief recap and puts five questions to Dean Elena Kagan ’86.

The Laws in Wartime Professor Jack Goldsmith
Slate Magazine, April 2 “We are surprisingly close to putting policy issues in the war on terrorism on…

As a 3L at Yale Law School in the mid-1960s, Charles Donahue studied a series of decisions by Pope Alexander III (1159-1181) that became the basis of marriage law in Western Europe for the next three centuries. At the time, he didn’t realize how they would come to rule his own life.

Most judges, faced with the task of interpreting unclear statutes, want to do the right thing, says Harvard Law School Professor Einer Elhauge ’86. Unfortunately, it isn’t always easy.

Randall Kennedy knows what it’s like to be called a sellout. Throughout his 24-year career at Harvard Law School, Kennedy has developed a reputation as a professor who is not afraid to challenge orthodoxies—sometimes to the alarm of liberals and black Americans.

While in Guatemala this winter, Therese Rohrbeck touched what remains of The Dream of Pope Gregory IX.