Family, Gender & Children

To prevent domestic violence, do we now overregulate the home? A scholar raises some provocative questions.

HLS Professor Elizabeth Warren's op-ed entitled “America without a Middle Class,”  appeared in the Dec. 2, 2009 edition of The Huffington Post. Warren is chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel on the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP).

Milton Hershey had no children so he said he would make the “orphan boys of the United States” his heirs.To that end, the chocolatier founded the Milton Hershey School, which today serves 1,700 underprivileged children and has an endowment of $6.2 billion. In 2005, Hershey had the nation’s fifth largest endowment, which was about half the size of Princeton’s and Stanford’s but larger than that of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Harvard Law School Dean Martha Minow was honored at the 40th Anniversary Celebration of the Massachusetts Advocates for Children (MAC) on November 13, along with Marian Wright Edelman, president of the Children’s Defense Fund, and the late Senator Edward Kennedy.

“Much of the world…focuses on the bad things that happen when kids get placed in international adoption. When you shut down international adoptions in order to address bad things which occasionally happen, what you do is commit monumental human rights violations.” That was the testimony of Harvard Law School Professor and Faculty Director of HLS’s Child Advocacy Program Elizabeth Bartholet ’65 before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights on Nov. 6.

Harvard Law School Professor Elizabeth Bartholet ’65 will testify before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights on November 6 regarding the “Human Rights of Unparented Children and International Adoption Policies” in the Americas. The hearing comes after a request made by the HLS Child Advocacy Program (CAP) and the Center for Adoption Policy.

Experts on the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy and veterans who served under it drew a-standing-room-only crowd at Harvard Law School last week, during a panel discussion sponsored by the student organization Lambda and moderated by Dean Martha Minow.

On Oct. 14, HLS Professor Elizabeth Warren, an expert on consumer and bankruptcy law, received the 2009 Lelia J. Robinson Award from the Women’s Bar Association of Massachusetts. The Robinson Award, named after the first woman admitted to the Massachusetts bar, recognizes women who are engaged in groundbreaking work in the legal profession, and who have served as mentors and role models for other female attorneys.

Far more is at risk in the health care reform debates than the well-being of the 47 million Americans who are currently uninsured, according to Jeff Crowley, the White House director of the Office of National AIDS Policy and senior adviser on Disability Policy, who spoke to an engaged crowd of about 60 students and others at HLS Wednesday night.

The family stories of black Americans and the findings of population geneticists make clear that Michelle Obama’s family history is far from unique. The vast majority of black Americans whose ancestors were enslaved in North America have some degree of mixed ancestry.

Harvard Law School Professor John Palfrey ’01 will testify before the House subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security today regarding two pieces of legislation designed to address cyberbullying and other online safety issues for children. A live webcast of the testimony will be available beginning at 3 p.m.

This summer, hundreds of Harvard Law School students fanned out across the country and around the world to work as summer interns and fellows, exploring career options and using their legal skills in addressing a variety of problems. Here’s a look at four students and their summer experiences:

The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation announced that Rebecca Onie ’03 is one of 24 recipients of the 2009 MacArthur Fellowship, more commonly known as the Macarthur “Genius Award.”

President Barack H. Obama ’91 nominated Chai R. Feldblum ’85 to the position of commissioner of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission on Monday, Sept. 14.

President Barack Obama ’91 has nominated Harvard Law School Dean Martha Minow, along with John Levi '72 LL.M. '73 and Gloria Valencia-Weber '86, to the board of the Legal Services Corporation, a bi-partisan, government-sponsored organization that provides civil legal assistance to low-income Americans. The nominations require approval by the Senate.

As the ground shifts, an expert evaluates the role of litigation.

What if the government forced all citizens to get genetic testing to find out if they were carriers of a deadly disease such as Tay-Sachs? “Any constitutional problem with that?” I. Glenn Cohen ’03 asks the 25 students in his popular course, Genetics and Reproductive Technology: Legal and Ethical Issues, as he paces before the blackboard in a Hauser classroom.

For students looking for cutting-edge legal work in the realm of new technologies, there may be no better place than the Cyberlaw Clinic at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society. In the fall of 2008, more than 40 students were involved in a wide range of projects that explored areas such as free speech, intellectual property and online child safety in the context of the Internet and other rapidly developing technologies. Many of the projects the center undertook involves issues being litigated for the first time.

Support for International Adoption principles is growing, says HLS Professor Elizabeth Bartholet, citing endorsements for Policy Statement and the recent Malawi ruling in the Madonna case.

In a May 10 New York Times editorial “Celebrity Adoptions and the Real World,” HLS Professor Elizabeth Bartholet ’65, the faculty director of the Child Advocacy Program at Harvard Law School, was one of six contributors who shared their opinions on international adoption and what the standard should be for allowing international adoptions.