International

There she stood, in northern Libya, a spread of explosive weapons before her: mortars and rockets and surface-to-air missiles almost 20 feet long. For all her work in post-conflict zones, senior clinical instructor Bonnie Docherty ’01 had never seen anything like it. The weapons stretched on for miles. It was March, five months after the revolution had ended, and Docherty was supervising a team from the International Human Rights Clinic on a trip to assess the humanitarian risks of abandoned weapons. As the team traveled from city to city, the scale of the problem was startling.

The World Trade Organization has appointed Harvard Law School alumnus and former HLS Visiting Professor of Law Seung Wha Chang LL.M. ’92 S.J.D. ’94 to serve on its seven-member Appellate Body. Chang will settle international trade disputes alongside distinguished trade experts from the U.S., the E.U., China, India, Mexico and South Africa.

Nine Harvard Law School students recently participated in the 2012 Willem C. Vis International Commercial Arbitration Moot Competitions in Vienna and Hong Kong. Nearly 400 law school teams from around the world participated in the Vis Competition, which aims to train future leaders in methods of alternative dispute resolution.

Women played an important role in the Arab Spring revolutions, and their involvement is crucial to the ongoing political change in the region. To that end, the Harvard Law School Women’s Law Association sponsored an event presenting the perspectives of several HLS and Harvard Kennedy School women students from Egypt, Lebanon, and Saudi Arabia. The Women in the Arab Awakening panelists discussed their experiences as both activists in and observers of these events, and the subsequent impact the revolutions have had on women.

Last fall, the Harvard Law Documentary Studio offered Lauren Estévez ’13 and four other students the training, funding and equipment they needed to make a short documentary film. It was a challenge, fitting filmmaking into law school. But after months of research, shooting, and editing, Estévez’s 12-minute film about the lives of citrus workers in Florida screened this month at the Harvard Film Archive, part of the Studio’s first annual DOC Festival.

During the third week in March, a number of Harvard Law students traveled around the world and to remote areas in the U.S. to offer their legal services. With funding from the Office of Clinical and Pro Bono Programs, teams of students worked with farmers in the Mississippi Delta, immigrants in Alabama and patients living with HIV/AIDS in New Orleans.

Three times last month, Harvard Law School Professor Robert Mnookin brought in prominent Cuban intellectual Rafael M. Hernández Rodríguez via videoconference to speak to his reading group on the topic of negotiating with Cuba. According to Mnookin, it’s the first time a Cuban scholar has participated in an American seminar from Cuba itself, an event for which took Mnookin weeks of back and forth with Cuba’s Ministry of Culture to obtain permission, giving a glimpse into the continued hold of the Communist bureaucracy in Havana.

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.

"The Alternative to Shareholder Class Actions," an op-ed by Harvard Law School Professor Hal Scott and Leslie N. Silverman, appeared in the Apr. 1 edition of The Wall Street Journal.

On March 3, the Harvard Law School WTO moot court team won the North America regional at the ELSA Moot Court Competition (EMC²) on WTO Law.  This year’s competition was held at American University Washington College of Law in Washington D.C. This was the first year a team from HLS has competed.

“I took the view that what we ought to be talking about and thinking about was universal suffrage,” stated Michael Young in a lecture at Harvard Law School titled, “The Secret Talks That Led to the Fall of Apartheid.”  As a British businessman in the 1980s, Young initiated and led unprecedented talks between the African National Congress and the South African government that led to the end of apartheid in South Africa.

As part of the Harvard Negotiation & Mediation Clinical Program (HNMCP), Krystyna Wamboldt ’12 and Rachel Krol ’12 traveled to Jerusalem in January with HLS Clinical Professor Robert Bordone ’97 to teach negotiation and mediation skills to a group of Israeli and Palestinian teenagers.

On March 22, the Human Rights Program and International Legal Studies at Harvard Law School sponsored “Protecting Human Rights Through the Mechanism of UN Special Rapporteurs,” a talk by Surya Subedi. Subedi, United Nations Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in Cambodia and Professor of International Law at the University of Leeds, discussed the role of the Special Rapporteurs in combating human rights abuses and he shared anecdotes about his work in Cambodia.

Harvard Law School Professor Hal Scott’s Program on International Financial Systems (PIFS) hosted the 10th annual Symposium on Building the Financial System of the Twenty-first Century: An Agenda for Europe and the United States on March 22-24 at the Weill Center in Armonk, N.Y.  Co-hosted by the Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS), the event gathered 100 senior executives and government officials from the financial industry, policymaking arenas, law, and academia.

Harvard Law School Professor Matthew Stephenson ‘03 delivered the keynote speech at the 2nd annual Evidence-Based Anti-Corruption Policies Conference held on Jan. 11 and 12 in Bangkok, Thailand.  

In a Feb. 20 opinion piece for the online journal Project Syndicate, Harvard Law School Professor Mark Roe ’75 addresses European leaders’ support for imposing a “Tobin tax” on financial transactions.

An array of luminaries from academia and the bench—and from around the world—came to Harvard Law School to celebrate Professor Frank Michelman ’60 and his influential work, as he prepares to retire after nearly half a century on the HLS faculty.

This past January, three students from Harvard Law School’s Negotiation and Mediation Clinical Program traveled to Chile to investigate the Ministry of Justice’s neighborhood multi-door courthouse pilot program.

Harvard Law School Professor William Alford ’77 recently appeared on the radio program ‘The Takeaway’ to discuss the future of U.S.-China relations, specifically with regard to trade and Chinese intellectual property law, which Alford describes as “a work in progress.”

In a replica of a high-level White House negotiation session, teams of students in a new advanced negotiation workshop at Harvard Law School offered advice on how to handle Guantanamo detainees. Although the negotiation wasn’t real, for the students the stakes were still high: One team was later selected by fellow students to travel to Washington, D.C., to make a presentation on Guantanamo to U.S. Assistant Attorney General Ronald Weich.