Today Posts

A hard hat sits on a bookshelf in her office. It's a requirement for visiting the construction site across from the Dimock Community Health Center, but the prop fits Ruth Ellen Fitch '83, the center's president and CEO, in more ways than one.

Brandon Moon was a 25-year-old college student at the University of Texas at El Paso in 1988 when he was convicted of rape and sentenced to 75 years in prison. Last December, after 16 years behind bars, he was released following conclusive DNA testing that proved his innocence.

John G. Roberts Jr. '79 is the first graduate of Harvard Law School to become chief justice of the United States.

This September, Harvard Law School will hold its second Celebration of Black Alumni, bringing hundreds of black Harvard Law graduates to campus for a range of programming focusing on national and international legal issues. Highlights of the three-day event include a keynote address by U.S. Sen. Barack Obama, a 1991 Harvard Law graduate, and speeches by Harvard President Lawrence Summers and Law School Dean Elena Kagan. The event will take place on the HLS campus September 16-18.

President Bush has nominated Harvard Law graduate John G. Roberts Jr., a federal appeals court judge, to fill the Supreme Court vacancy created earlier this month when Associate Justice Sandra Day O'Connor announced her retirement. Roberts graduated from Harvard Law School in 1979 and from Harvard College in 1976.

The Supreme Court recently agreed to hear the case Whitman v. Department of Transportation in which the petition for certiorari prepared by a class at Harvard Law School. The winter 2005 Supreme Court Litigation class, taught by instructors Amy Howe and Thomas Goldstein, researched and wrote the petition.

Donald Alexander '48 is a partner at Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld in Washington, D.C., where he has a wide-ranging tax practice.

Through literature and law, Larissa Behrendt LL.M. '94 S.J.D. '98 speaks for aboriginal rights.

Twenty-six years ago, Peter Ferrara '79 picked a then obscure topic for his third-year paper: Social Security solvency.

AIDS, malaria and malnutrition claim millions of lives in the developing world every year. One approach to such problems is to provide free health products--condoms, malaria kits and vitamin supplements--to health clinics.

George Leighton '43 ('46) spent his childhood in Massachusetts summering in Plymouth and wintering in New Bedford. His summer home was a shanty with no running water or electricity near the cranberry bogs, and his winter home was an unheated apartment near the textile mills.

Drug use is down over the last 25 years, but a half million Americans are in prison for drug offenses. How should success be measured?

Can a veteran prosecutor whip the Department of Homeland Security into shape? Michael Chertoff '78 has already started.

After her people were slaughtered by neighbors, Geraldine Umugwaneza LL.M. '05 knows that forgiveness is elusive, but she is determined to help Rwanda move forward.

On Jan. 12, 2005, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the strict and sometimes unforgiving sentencing guidelines that have tied the hands of federal judges for nearly 20 years would no longer bind them.

The evidence suggests that Dershowitz is not overstating the case. "Rights from Wrongs: A Secular Theory of the Origins of Rights" (Basic Books), published in November 2004, was his ninth book since the beginning of 2000--and his 19th since 1982, when Random House published his first popular book about law, "The Best Defense."

“Excessive pay isn’t the only cost of flawed compensation arrangements. Executives’ influence over their boards has produced pay arrangements that dilute and sometimes pervert incentives.

A sampling from this year's crop of 3L papers.