Criminal

Some recent faculty and clinical highlights—from research on anti-corruption efforts to conferences on financial regulation.

“HLS Thinks Big,” an event inspired by the global TED (Technology, Entertainment and Design) talks and modeled after the university's “Harvard Thinks Big” event, was held at Harvard Law School on May 28. Four professors—Daniel Nagin, Glenn Cohen '03, Jeannie Suk '02, and James Greiner—presented on some of their recent work and research.

When Harvard Law Professor Daniel Meltzer ’75 was named director of the American Law Institute in January, he joined a long line of members of the HLS community who have helped shape the direction of the law from inside the ALI.

Fifty years after the Supreme Court determined in Gideon v. Wainwright that criminal defendants must be provided with counsel, scholars and practitioners from around the country grappled with continued limits on access to justice during an Harvard Law School conference in April titled “Toward a Civil Gideon: The Future of Legal Services.”

On March 12 at Harvard Law School, award-winning filmmaker Ken Burns joined Harvard Law School Professor Charles Ogletree and two Central Park Five members for a film screening and panel discussion of his new documentary “The Central Park Five,” which tells the story of five Black and Latino teenagers who were wrongly convicted of raping and beating a white woman in New York City’s Central Park in 1989. The event was co-sponsored by Harvard Law School’s Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race & Justice and the Prison Studies Project and the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research.

Nancy Gertner's two decades as a defense attorney in Boston as a self-described “revolutionary” and “radical lawyer” redoubled her belief in the inherent unfairness of many aspects of the criminal justice system, including its disparate impact on racial minorities. As she relates in her new book, it also laid the groundwork for her federal judgeship.

Created in 1971, the Harvard Law School Prison Legal Assistance Project may be the only law school organization in the country to handle such a wide variety of inmate needs. It also plays a unique role in the lives of HLS students.

“Client Science: Advice for Lawyers on Counseling Clients through Bad News and Other Legal Realities,” by Marjorie Corman Aaron ’81 (Oxford). No one likes to deliver bad news—attorneys included. But oftentimes providing honest and difficult advice is a crucial part of the job, and Aaron offers her own advice on how best to do it.

On August 20, the New York Times’ “Room for Debate” segment explored the question “Do Prosecutors Have Too Much Power?” HLS Professor of Practice Nancy Gertner, a former judge of the U.S. District Court for Massachusetts, was one of five debaters who weighed in on the topic.“You can’t bargain away your right to counsel in a guilty plea deal; you shouldn’t be allowed to bargain away your right to appeal,” writes Gertner.

Robert McDuff ’80 remembers clearly what first got him thinking about civil rights and the profession of law. In 1968, when he was 12, he read a newspaper account of a murder trial in his hometown of Hattiesburg, Miss. The victim was an African-American shopkeeper and civil rights leader killed by the Klan after he let other other African-Americans use his store as a place to pay their poll taxes.

William Bratton, former Los Angeles police chief and police commissioner of New York, discussed his new book, “Collaborate or Perish! Reaching across Boundaries in a Networked World” (New York: Crown Business, 2012), at the 13th annual Police Union Leadership Seminar hosted by the Labor & Worklife Program at Harvard Law School.

Students from Harvard Law School took second place in the 22nd Annual National Criminal Justice Trial Advocacy Competition, held March 29-31, in Chicago.

Steven Goldberg ’72 is part of the legal team challenging the National Security Agency’s warrantless wireless wiretap of an Islamic charity in southern Oregon. He visited Harvard Law School on March 31 to discuss the case in the context of how law students and lawyers working apart from large organizations can get involved in similar cases.

As part of the Defending Childhood Task Force, Harvard Law School Professor Charles Ogletree participated in a hearing on March 21 at the University of Miami School of Law, addressing the problem of children’s exposure to community violence.

Pop sensation Lady Gaga launched her anti-bullying, youth-empowering Born This Way Foundation (BTWF) at Sanders Theatre on Wednesday during an Askwith Forum sponsored by the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE). The foundation was established in partnership with HGSE, Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, the John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and the California Endowment. Special guests included Oprah Winfrey, author and speaker Deepak Chopra, U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen G. Sebelius, and Harvard Law School professor Charles J. Ogletree.

The dispute over raw milk has become one of the most heated debates in the food law community over the last several years—proponents and opponents alike have even staged protests at the White House. Raw milk is currently illegal in 22 states. On Feb. 16, the Harvard Food and Law Society staged a debate on the issue at Harvard Law School.

Nancy Gertner, HLS professor of practice and former judge of the U.S. District Court for Massachusetts, was counsel of record in an amicus brief submitted to the U.S. Supreme Court in Dorsey v. U.S. and Corey Hill v. U.S. The Court’s decision will determine whether the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010, which redressed some of the inequities in the sentencing of defendants in crack-cocaine cases, applies to defendants who were sentenced after the law was enacted, but whose crimes were committed beforehand.

On Aug. 25, Benjamin B. Ferencz ’43, who served as a chief prosecutor in the Nuremberg Trials, made the concluding remarks for the prosecution in the International Criminal Court’s first case.

HLS Clinical Professor Ron Sullivan ’94, who serves as director of the Harvard Criminal Justice Institute, was recently appointed to the Massachusetts Committee for Public Counsel Services. Sullivan joins Professor Carol Steiker ’86, who is also a member of the committee.