Today Posts

This issue of the Bulletin is dedicated to the fast-changing face of the legal profession, which is evolving in ways unimaginable even a decade ago.

The news from Baghdad this month tends to make me share Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.’s famous preference for “not so much where we are, but in what direction we are moving.”

Women are still second-class citizens in the legal profession. What can be done about it?

In the 1970s, many went into law to make a difference. Some of them are finally making it now. Today’s young lawyers don’t want to wait that long.

Celebrated international law professor Louis B. Sohn LL.M. ’40 S.J.D. ’58 died at his home in Falls Church, Va., in June. He spent much of his career advocating for increased powers for the United Nations and championing disarmament and human rights.

Did some 19th-century images cause the legal profession’s image problem? Anyone who is tempted to think that lawyer jokes and barbs aimed at the legal…

Jay Hebert ’ 86 is president of the Harvard Law School Association. He chairs the communications practice group of the law firm of Vinson & Elkins, and he’s a partner in the firm’s business and international group.

In May 2003, Matias Garcia, a farm laborer from Oaxaca, Mexico, set out to cross the U.S. border to find work. For Garcia, like hundreds of others each year, the attempt proved fatal—he perished on a 32-mile trek across the blistering Arizona desert.

If you thought the first year of law school tested your mettle, try running for Congress. It’s not always easy being a Harvard lawyer on the campaign trail.

A group of Harvard Law students has helped to bring about a landmark decision by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, which ruled earlier this month that the Brazilian government bears responsibility for the death of a patient in a state-affiliated psychiatric hospital.

Last week, Harvard Law graduate Stuart Rabner was appointed attorney general of New Jersey by Governor Jon Corzine. Rabner is a member of the class of '85.

An op-ed co-written by Professor Jon Hanson: To sports fans, it probably wasn't a surprise to learn that former Ohio State University football star Maurice Clarett was arrested again the other week. The evasive running back who had carried the Buckeyes to the 2002 National Championship was unsuccessful in evading the police in a car chase that occurred near the home of a witness in his upcoming robbery trial.

The following op-ed, co-written by Professor Christine Desan, A model for fair campaigns, appeared in The Boston Globe on August 18, 2006: With less than three months until the November election, the governor's race is heating up in Massachusetts.

The following essay by Professor David Barron, Boxed Out, appeared in The Boston Globe on August 13, 2006: Not so long ago, America's big cities were so desperate to attract commercial development they gladly would have given away the store to get one. But not now, as Wal-Mart and other super-retailers recently discovered.

The following op-ed, co-written by Professor Martha Minow, Relearning Vietnam's painful lessons, appeared in The Boston Globe on August 14, 2006. Current events make the Vietnam era more relevant than ever. We are engaged in a war without plan or prospects for disengagement. The conflict seems part of a global danger, but we also seem interlopers -- and attractive targets -- in a civil war.

In the wake of September 11, there was a lively debate about the optimal mix of "hard" versus "soft" power--guns versus diplomacy, military force versus foreign aid. Thursday's foiled plot to blow up commercial jets shows that a similar divide informs the world of police work. Scotland Yard and the FBI sometimes stop terrorists by shooting them, just as the criminal justice system sometimes stops attempted murders by incarcerating the would-be killers.