Ethics

In late March, a two-day hackathon organized by the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics and MIT Center for Civic Media brought together technologists and thinkers to come up with new ways to stem corporate and government corruption.

Harvard Law School Professor Adrian Vermeule ’93 is the co-editor of a new online review of books, The New Rambler. Co-edited by Vermeule, Stanford University Professor Blakey Vermeule and University of Chicago Law Professor Eric Posner, The New Rambler publishes reviews of books about ideas, including literary fiction.

On March 6, Harvard Law School’s Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice hosted Dying While Black and Brown, a dance performance focused on capital punishment and the disproportionate numbers of incarcerated people of color. The performance was first commissioned by the San Francisco Equal Justice Society as part of the society’s campaign to restore 14th Amendment protections for victims of discrimination, including those on death row.

It’s been just a year since Thomas Piketty’s “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” turned the respected French economist from the University of Paris into an academic and publishing rock star. Piketty’s status showed little sign of fading during his March 6 visit to Harvard to speak about the book before an overflow crowd inside Austin Hall at Harvard Law School.

The numbers paint a telling picture. In the United States of the 1950s there were between 3 million and 4 million annual cases of measles,…

On Nov. 24, the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard hosted “Too Big to Fail or Too Hard to Remember: Lessons from the New Deal and the Triumph, Tragedy, and Lost Legacy of James M. Landis,” a discussion of the legacy of scholar, administrator, advocate and political adviser known for his seminal contribution to the creation of the modern system of market regulation in the United States.

Lawrence Lessig has become an activist. And he is taking on the system he critiqued with a bold effort to appropriate what he sees as one of its corrupting forces.

Anita Hill, along with her former legal adviser, Harvard Law Professor Charles Ogletree, and Nan Stein, senior research scientist at Wellesley’s Centers for Women, came together at Harvard Law's Wasserstein Hall to view a screening of the 2013 documentary “Anita,” and to talk about what has changed since she started a national conversation about sexual harassment in 1991.

Harvard Law School’s Legal Services Center student, Shaina Wamsley J.D. ’14, will receive the 2014 Law Student Ethics Award from the Northeast Chapter of the Association of Corporate Counsel.

An unwavering believer in international law Detlev Frederick Vagts ’51, a renowned international law scholar and an expert on transnational business problems and the laws…

Harvard Law School's Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics will launch a novel Ethics and Law initiative as part of the Regulatory Foundations, Ethics, and Law Program of Harvard Catalyst | The Harvard Clinical and Translational Science Center.

In early November, David Shribman, the executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, sat down with his attorney, Fritz Byers ’81, before an audience at Harvard…

As Americans travel to other countries for medical care, Professor Glenn Cohen looks at the implications at home and abroad.

At a time when Americans are expressing record dissatisfaction with Washington, the publication this fall of Professor Lawrence Lessig’s latest book couldn’t be more opportune. “Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress—and a Plan to Stop It” (Twelve) is an exhaustively researched and passionately argued indictment of Capitol Hill and the money-centered daily dance between lawmakers and lobbyists.

Lawrence Lessig, the Roy L. Furman Professor of Law and Leadership at HLS and director of Harvard’s Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics, is the author of “Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress—and a Plan to Stop It,” an exhaustively researched and passionately argued indictment of Capitol Hill and the money-centered daily dance between lawmakers and lobbyists. As a columnist for Atlantic Magazine and in interviews on national media, he has shared his ideas on how to stop corruption in Congress. He was recently profiled in a Harvard Magazine piece by Jonathan Shaw entitled “A Radical Fix for the Republic.”

In the mid-1990s, Dennis Davis, then a judge of the High Court of Cape Town, sought out HLS Professor Frank Michelman ’60 to advise South African officials on constitutional interpretation. “From that moment on, he became a resource person for us. We regard him as one of ours,” said Davis. “It’s a very, very deep relationship.”

Harvard Law School student Rajan Sonik ‘12 recently received the 2012 Law Student Ethics Award from the Association of Corporate Counsel, Northeast Chapter. One of eleven students honored from participating local law schools, Sonik was recognized for demonstrating an early commitment to ethics through his work in a clinical program.

Paul Volcker, former chairman of the Federal Reserve under Presidents Carter and Reagan, and former chairman of President Obama’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board, was on campus in early April as a guest of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics series on institutional corruption. The Center’s director, Professor Lawrence Lessig, introduced him to an at-capacity crowd in Ames Courtroom before yielding the floor to Harvard Business School Professor Emeritus Malcolm Salter, who moderated a conversation with Volcker on the historical context of today’s financial crisis and current efforts to thwart future crises.

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.

Two years after considering the possibility of work stoppages in major league sports, the annual Harvard Law School Sports Law Symposium this year examined unresolved issues in the aftermath of collective bargaining agreements, as well as the ongoing problems of concussions and performance-enhancing drugs.