International

Doaa Abu Elyounes believes that law can change people’s lives. Now, set to graduate with an LL.M. degree from Harvard Law School, Abu Elyounes plans to become a public service lawyer to ensure that everybody has access to the laws that changed hers.

As Alice Lee LL.M. ’16 talks about her decision to pursue an LL.M. degree in the United States, she breaks into a smile. “I love animals and wildlife. I just feel something for them.”

Naz K. Modirzadeh '02, the founding director of the Harvard Law School Program on International Law and Armed Conflict (PILAC), has been appointed as a professor of practice at Harvard Law School.

For more than seven years, John Carlin ’99 has been at the center of the most sensitive counterterrorism cases, which have often involved tricky technological questions—first as an adviser to FBI Director Robert Mueller and then at the National Security Division.

In last year’s Academy Award-nominated film “Bridge of Spies,” Tom Hanks plays a lawyer who defends an accused Soviet spy in the U.S. The Hanks character appears to be dumbfounded that he has been asked to take on such an assignment. “I’m an insurance lawyer,” he says. The real lawyer whom Hanks portrays, James B. Donovan ’40, was that—and much more.

When Wendy Sherman, former under secretary of state for political affairs, was in the midst of negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program, she often felt that her team was playing “several games of multidimensional chess at the same time.” On April 20, Sherman delivered a guest lecture to the Harvard Law School Negotiation Workshop.

“FDA in the 21st Century: The Challenges of Regulating Drugs and New Technologies,” edited by Holly Fernandez Lynch and I. Glenn Cohen ’03 (Columbia). Stemming from a 2013 conference at HLS, the book features essays covering major developments that have changed how the FDA regulates; how the agency encourages transparency; First Amendment issues; access to drugs; and evolving issues in drug-safety communication. These issues, the editors write, lie “at the heart of our health and health care.”

On April 12, students in Professor of Practice Urs Gasser’s Spring 2016 Comparative Online Privacy Seminar at Harvard Law School hosted a student-led mini-symposium on data privacy in the U.S. and the EU with experts from private companies, law firms, and academia.

Harvard Law School students Phil Caruso '18 and Pamela Nwaoko '16 are among 12 law students selected by FASPE (Fellowships at Auschwitz for the Study of Professional Ethics) to participate in a two-week program in Europe this summer, which uses the conduct of lawyers and judges in Nazi Germany as a launching point for an intensive course of study on ethics in the legal profession today.

Mark Wu ’96, an assistant professor at HLS who specializes in international economics and trade law, and lead organizer of the decennial academic conference of the World Trade Organization (WTO), spoke with the Harvard Gazette about the most pressing issues affecting trade and the WTO, and how he sees the future of trade policy.

On April 1, Harvard Law School hosted a conference on 'Presidential Power in an Era of Polarized Conflict,' a daylong gathering in which experts from both sides of the aisle debated the president’s power in foreign and domestic affairs, and in issues of enforcement or non-enforcement.

Gabriella Blum LL.M. ’01 S.J.D. ’03, Rita E. Hauser Professor of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law at Harvard Law School has been named a 2016 Andrew Carnegie Fellow by the Carnegie Corporation of New York.

In a report issued last week, the Harvard Law School International Human Rights Clinic and Human Rights Watch call for countries to retain meaningful human control over weapons systems and ban fully autonomous weapons, also known as 'killer robots.'

Clinical Instructor Deborah Popowski '08 has led the effort to hold psychologists accountable for their involvement in torture of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay.

On March 29, the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School celebrated its first decade and kicked off the next with a conference that focused on the future of health law and policy.

Harvard Law student Aya Saed ’17 was among 30 recipients selected to receive the Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowships for New Americans, the premier graduate school fellowship for immigrants and children of immigrants.

President of the European Court of Justice Koen Lenaerts LL.M. ’78 keeps a photo engraving of Austin Hall in his home office in Leuven, Belgium. The image reminds him of the course he took from then HLS Professor Stephen Breyer ’64 (a 2L named John G. Roberts was also in the class), his LL.M. thesis with Duncan Kennedy, and hours spent perusing newspapers from around the world at Out of Town News in the Square. HLS is also now the alma mater of one of his six daughters.

In his latest book, 'A World of Struggle: How Power, Law, and Expertise Shape Global Political Economy,' Professor David Kennedy points to widespread uncertainty and ambivalence about the world and explores 'the role of expertise and professional practice in the routine conflicts through which global political and economic life takes shape.'

Each year, teams of Harvard Law School students are given the opportunity to spend their Spring Break experiencing legal services work with clinics and legal organizations in the Boston area, or working on projects around the country and abroad--here, a few students share their accounts, reflecting on the significance of their service.

Across HLS, faculty are focusing on international access to lifesaving drugs for underserved populations. One forthcoming book, “The Health Crisis in the Developing World and…

Harvard Law School Visiting Lecturer Juan Carlos Zarate ’97, a former deputy national security adviser in the George W. Bush administration and a former assistant secretary of the U.S. Treasury for terrorist financing and financial crimes, recently spoke with The Harvard Gazette about the problem of money-laundering in the real estate industry—the scope of it, and what new oversight might portend.