Criminal

Harvard Law School Professor Laurence H. Tribe ’66 will receive an honorary doctorate on March 29 from Mexico’s Instituto Nacional de Ciencias Penales (INACIPE), or National Institute of Criminal Science. He will be the first American to receive the annual “honoris causa” doctorate since its inception in 1998.

William Stuntz, a renowned scholar of criminal justice at Harvard Law School,  an evangelical Christian and a teacher much beloved by students and colleagues, died March 15 after a long battle with cancer.

Harvard Law Professor Yochai Benkler ’94 has released an article detailing U.S. government and news media censorship of WikiLeaks after the organization released the Afghan War Diary, the Iraq War Logs, and U.S. State department diplomatic cables in 2010. Among his key conclusions: The government overstated and overreacted to the WikiLeaks documents, and the mainstream news media followed suit by engaging in self-censorship. Benkler argues further that there is no sound Constitutional basis for a criminal prosecution of WikiLeaks or its leader, Julian Assange.

Standing on principles shaped at HLS, Steven Goldberg ’72 wins a landmark ruling in a case involving one of the most controversial initiatives surrounding the War on Terror. For Goldberg the case exemplifies overreach at the highest level of government.

Harvard Law School Professor Jack Goldsmith co-wrote an op-ed with Benjamin Wittes for the Nov. 19, 2010 edition of The Washington Post titled “Ghailani verdict makes stronger case for military detentions.” The piece addresses debate over the Obama administration’s policy to try former Guantanamo detainees in civilian court.

Jeannie Suk ’02 has gained tenure as a professor of law at Harvard. The faculty voted to grant tenure on Oct. 14 and Harvard University approved it immediately thereafter.

Alex Whiting, an assistant clinical professor of law at Harvard Law School, will join the International Criminal Court (ICC) as the investigation coordinator this December. Serving as the deputy to the chief of investigations, he will be responsible for managing and providing legal guidance and direction to all of the ICC’s investigations in this new post.

Former prosecutor Paul Butler ’86 now argues for jury nullification in cases of nonviolent offenders—even if they are guilty.

Five Harvard Law School alumni, including Lecturer on Law and Clinical Instructor at the Human Rights Project Susan Farbstein ’04, have been selected as finalists for the 2010 Trial Lawyer of the Year Award, which is presented each year by the Public Justice foundation to an attorney or team of attorneys who have made the most outstanding contribution to the public interest through precedent-setting litigation.

On May 16, 2010, the Supreme Court ruled that juveniles who commit crimes in which no one is killed may not be sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Justice Anthony Kennedy ’61 wrote the opinion for a 6-3 Court, citing a brief submitted by the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute at HLS, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers.

Harvard Law School’s International Human Rights Clinic submitted an amicus brief to the Supreme Court in support of a petition for certiorari in a major corporate Alien Tort Statute case, Presbyterian Church of Sudan v. Talisman Energy, Inc. The Clinic served as counsel on behalf of international law scholars and jurists to argue that those who knowingly aid and abet egregious human rights violations can be held liable under customary international law.

Legal academia is not famous for collective displays of appreciation, and even less so for the humility of its members. So the celebration of the work of William Stuntz held at Harvard Law School on March 26 and 27 was doubly extraordinary.

The HLS Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice recently filed, along with a host of other organizations, an amicus curiae brief in the North Carolina Supreme Court on a school-to-prison pipeline case.

Harvard Law Professor Philip Heymann believes that by examining the violence associated with Mexican drug cartels along the U.S. border with a new perspective, the cartels’ tenacious grip may be countered. To that end, Heymann and Mathea Falco, president of the Washington D.C.-based non-profit research institute Drug Strategies, organized a working group on “Transnational Organized Crime” at the Harvard Law School on April 7 to dissect the Mexican drug trade from past to present.

On March 8, Associate Attorney General Tom Perrelli ’91 returned to Harvard Law School to discuss the Department of Justice’s new violence against women initiative. Perrelli’s visit marked the first stop on a month-long college campus tour sponsored by DOJ.

In 2003, a year after the International Criminal Court was created—the world’s first permanent war crimes tribunal—Luis Moreno-Ocampo became its first prosecutor.

Harvard law School Professor Adrian Vermeule ’93 wrote the book review “States of Detention,” which appeared in The New Republic on March 1, 2010. 

On Wednesday, September 16, the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice hosted an event to recognize the extraordinary death penalty case of Troy Anthony Davis. Charles Ogletree '78, Jesse Climenko Professor of Law, moderated a panel which brought to together Davis' sister, Martina Correia, his amicus counsel Kathleen Behan, and Jason Ewart, an Arnold and Porter associate who represented Davis during his habeas corpus petition before the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals.

On Friday, November 6, Harvard Law School hosted to a day-long conference entitled “Confronting Legal Injustice/Imagining Legal Justice” in Ames Courtroom. A plethora of speakers from a wide variety of backgrounds addressed shortcomings in the law concerning capital punishment. They also looked at the future of the death penalty.