Constitutional

From the Supreme Court, to the SEC, to an unidentified city under siege: legal analysis, memoir, a documentary and more works from HLS alumni.

President Donald J. Trump has appointed Anthony Scaramucci ’89 to serve as White House communications director, upping by one the number of Harvard Law School alumni tapped to serve in the administration since Trump’s inauguration.

Drawing on his interests in constitutional law, constitutional history, and racial equality, Professor Michael Klarman’s Last Lecture explored the obstacles faced — and in many ways, overcome — by feminist lawyers and African-American civil rights lawyers in the middle of the last century.

In January, it was as if the U.S. Supreme Court were playing host to a tournament of champions for past winners of the Ames Moot Court Competition, with three attorneys who argued Midland Funding, LLC v. Johnson having been on teams that won the competition within four years of each other at Harvard Law School.

Nancy Gertner, a retired federal judge in Massachusetts who is now a senior lecturer at Harvard Law School, spoke with the Gazette about the legal issues swirling around President Donald Trump and FBI Director James Comey's testimony to the Senate Intelligence Committee.

The mood was festive, rather than disputatious, on Friday evening as Supreme Court Associate Justices Stephen G. Breyer, J.D. ’64, and Neil M. Gorsuch, J.D. ’91, sat down to discuss “the rule of law,” capping off a Harvard Marshall Forum dinner in celebration of the 70th anniversary of the trans-Atlantic scholarship.

John Manning, the Bruce Bromley Professor of Law and Deputy Dean at Harvard Law School, and an eminent public-law scholar with expertise in statutory interpretation and structural constitutional law, will become the School’s next dean on July 1.

Sabrineh Ardalan ’02, assistant director of the Harvard Immigration and Refugee Clinical Program and a lecturer in the fields of immigration and refugee law and advocacy and trauma, refugees, and the law has been appointed assistant clinical professor at Harvard Law School.

Sally Yates, the acting attorney general whom President Trump fired for refusing to enforce his tightened strictures on entering the country, said Wednesday that she acted out of a belief that defending the executive order would have meant falsely claiming it was not directed at Muslims.

The concept of speech is typically defined as the communication of thoughts in spoken words. Yet the authors note that First Amendment protection of speech is far broader, covering nonrepresentational art, instrumental music, and even nonsense—individual topics that Tushnet, Chen, and Blocher focus on (in that order) in the book.

President Donald Trump taps alumni for White House and agency hires

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch ’91 made friends across the political spectrum at HLS.

Klemen Jaklič LL.M. ’00 S.J.D. ’11 has been elected judge of the Constitutional Court of Slovenia by the Slovenian parliament after being nominated by the president of Slovenia earlier this spring. His nine-year term officially started on March 27.

The abrupt firing of FBI Director James Comey has caused much consternation among Democrats and Republicans alike. Alex Whiting, professor of practice at the Law School, spoke with the Harvard Gazette about the ramifications of Comey's dismissal.

On March 23, William B. Schultz, former general counsel of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (2011-2016), discussed the complicated politics surrounding the Affordable Care Act and possible policy options for the next phase of the law’s evolution.

Harvard Law School Dean Martha Minow has appointed Professor Tomiko Brown-Nagin to be the faculty director of the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice (CHHI) at HLS.

Adriaan Lanni, the Touroff-Glueck Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, has received a 2017 Guggenheim fellowship, an award that honors exceptionally impressive achievement in the past and exceptional promise for future accomplishment.

In March, University of San Diego Law School Professor Lawrence Alexander visited HLS to deliver a talk titled "Law and Politics: What is their relation?" as part the Herbert W. Vaughan Lecture Series and Academic Panel, co-sponsored by the HLS Federalist Society.

More than 350 students raced through the halls of Harvard Law School solving clues, answering trivia questions, and taking selfies with professors as part of the school's first ever Public Interest Scavenger Hunt, which had students competing for prizes as the community came together to show support for students working in public interest law.

In a wide-ranging discussion with Dean Martha Minow, the Hon. Reena Raggi, a federal judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit since 2002, shared her memories of late ’70s HLS, discussed notable cases she decided, and shared her thoughts on what it takes to be a successful prosecutor.

In March, speakers at the Harvard Journal on Legislation’s 2017 Symposium, “Legislating on the World Stage,” explored the unique challenges of lawmaking in a context where domestic and international concerns frequently overlap and come into tension with one another.