Dean Elena Kagan ’86 announced today that I. Glenn Cohen ’03, Benjamin Roin ’05, and Benjamin Sachs have accepted offers to join the Harvard Law School faculty as assistant professors.
“I am thrilled to welcome these talented young scholars to the faculty,” said Kagan. “Glenn Cohen and Ben Roin will enrich our research and teaching in the new critical critical fields of bioethnics and biotechnology. Ben Sachs brings a wide range of practice experiences to our faculty and will do important scholarship and teaching relating to labor and workplace law.”
Cohen is currently an academic fellow at the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at HLS. Specializing in bioethics, he is the author of several law review articles on approaches to end-of-life decision-making, pediatric research ethics, pre-embryo disposition agreements, and commodification. His most recent article, “The Constitution and the Rights Not To Procreate,” has just been published in the Stanford Law Review. A companion article, “The Right Not To Be a Genetic Parent?,” is forthcoming in the Southern California Law Review in the Fall.
“I am truly honored to be joining the law school, and to have as colleagues the amazing people who, during my student days, shaped the way I think about the world and the law,” said Cohen. “With all the exciting things happening at the Petrie-Flom Center and the great connections the law school has with the medical and public health schools, Harvard is poised to become one of the preeminent places to study the intersection of law with health policy, bioethics, and biotechnology.”
While a student at HLS , Cohen was the winner of the prestigious Sears Prize for the highest grades during his 1L year. He was also an editor of the Harvard Law Review and a Hewlett Fellow in Law and Negotiation at the HLS Program on Negotiation. After law school, Cohen clerked for Chief Judge Michael Boudin of U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit. From 2004-2006, he was an honors program attorney in the Appellate Staff of the U.S. Department of Justice, Civil Division. During his tenure, he acted as lead counsel in over 11 Circuit Court cases, and in conjunction with the Solicitor General’s office, represented the United States in the U.S. Supreme Court. He holds a B.A. in Bioethics/Philosophy and Psychology from the University of Toronto.
Also an academic fellow at the Petrie-Flom Center for Bioethics, Roin is an expert in patent law. His scholarship includes work on issues involving patent law and biotechnology, including the effects of the patent process on the development of pharmaceuticals and possible legal solutions to problems in the pharmaceutical patent process. “I am thrilled to be joining the Harvard Law School faculty, and humbled to be starting my career at such an outstanding institution,” said Roin. “The community here is an ideal place for me to develop as a scholar.”
In addition to his J.D., Roin holds a B.A. from Amherst College. During law school, he served as primary editor of the Harvard Law Review and received the Sears Prize for the highest grade average in his 1L year. After graduating, he clerked for Judge Michael McConnell on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit.
Sachs is currently the Joseph Goldstein Fellow and Lecturer in Law at Yale Law School, where he has taught Emerging Trends in Labor Law since the fall of 2005. He is the author of several scholarly publications in leading law journals, and he has articles in progress about state and local labor law, new labor law regulation, and the “union wage gap.”
“I am honored to join the Harvard Law School faculty,” said Sachs. “The dynamism of the law school’s intellectual community, along with the deep strength of the University, makes Harvard the ideal place for contemporary labor law scholarship.”
Sachs holds a B.A. from Oberlin College, where he was a Truman Scholar and Phi Beta Kappa, as well as a J.D. from Yale Law School. Before obtaining his law degree, Sachs worked at the U.S. Department of Labor and in the Employment Division of Northeast Ohio Legal Services. He has also spent time at the Latino Workers Center and as a summer associate at Bredhoff & Kaiser in Washington, DC. After law school, he clerked for Judge Stephen Reinhardt of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. A Skadden Fellow, Sachs was a staff attorney at the Workplace Justice Project before becoming assistant general counsel of the Service Employees International Union.