International

This winter, as protests erupted throughout the Middle East, Jason Gelbort ’12 was one of the many obsessively watching the news, wondering if there was anything he could do to help. Then, on March 2, he went to a talk by Chibli Mallat, the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques Visiting Professor of Islamic Legal Studies at HLS.

The United Nation’s Committee on the Rights of the Child is currently examining Panama’s record on children’s rights with the help of a report coauthored by Harvard Law School’s International Human Rights Clinic.

HLS Professor Noah Feldman’s “Scorpions: The Battles and Triumphs of FDR’s Great Supreme Court Justices” (Twelve, 2010) was selected as the best legal book of the year by Scribes, the American Society of Legal Writers, winning its 2011 Book Award.

Harvard Law School Professor Jack Goldsmith was a guest on National Public Radio’s On Point on June 28, discussing presidential war powers and Congressional authority in relation to the United States’ current military action in Libya.

“Libyan Legal Limbo,” an op-ed by Harvard Law Professor Adrian Vermeule ’93 and University of Chicago Law Professor Eric Posner ’91, appeared June 27 on Slate.com.

On May 20 through 21, the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology and Bioethics at Harvard Law School convened an international, multidisciplinary conference providing legal and ethical analysis of one of the broadest reaching developments in health care of the last 20 years: its globalization.

On June 17, Harvard Law School’s International Human Rights Clinic submitted an amicus curiae brief to the U.S. Supreme Court in support of a petition for certiorari in a major corporate Alien Tort Statute (“ATS”) case, Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum Co.

The Reginald F. Lewis Foundation has made a gift of $1.5 million to Harvard Law School to continue the Reginald F. Lewis Fellowships, an 18-year-old program that has offered fellowships annually to law graduates who have demonstrated a strong interest in law scholarship and teaching.

This year’s “HLS Thinks Big” event, inspired by the global TED (Technology Entertainment and Design) talks and modeled after the College’s “Harvard Thinks Big” event first held last year, took place on May 23, featuring topics ranging from legal assistance for undocumented students to risk analysis in constitutional design.

On Thursday June 16, HLS Professor Hal Scott is testified before the US House of Representatives Committee on Financial Services in a hearing entitled “Financial Regulatory Reform: The International Context."

HLS Professor Noah Feldman and a team of HLS affiliates have authored a report at the request of the Commission on Truth and Reconciliation of Honduras (TRC), examining the constitutionality of the actions in Honduras that resulted in the 2009 military coup that removed President Manuel Zelaya from office. In the report, the authors offer recommendations for constitutional reform for the Central American country.

In recent decades, legislative bodies throughout North America and Europe have enacted sweeping laws to protect racial and ethnic minorities, women, the disabled and other groups who are victimized by discrimination. Perhaps not surprisingly, these efforts have encountered resistance—oftentimes successful—leaving anti-discrimination scholars and activists to ponder new strategies for dealing with an age-old problem. On May 6 and 7, a group of these interested scholars from the U.S., Canada and Europe participated in a Harvard Law School workshop that analyzed the recent evolution of anti-discrimination law on both continents.

Army Brigadier General Mark Martins ’90 accepted the Medal of Freedom, the highest honor conferred by Harvard Law School, and gave the inaugural Dean’s Distinguished Lecture on April 18 at HLS.

On an early morning in January, eight upper-year Harvard Law School students landed on the lone runway at the sleepy international airport in Lesotho where they were warmly welcomed by officials from the U.S. Embassy and the U.S. government’s Millennium Challenge Corporation (“MCC”), an innovative U.S. government foreign assistance agency.

In 2006, a series of coordinated uprisings in 74 detention centers and attacks on police stations and public buildings left 43 state officials and hundreds of civilians dead and brought São Paulo—South America’s largest city and financial capital—to a standstill. Harvard Law School’s International Human Rights Clinic and the leading Brazilian human rights group Justiça Global have now released a comprehensive study of the attacks.

In an op-ed published in The Huffington Post on May 5, Harvard Law School professor Alan M. Dershowitz assessed the decision made by the Obama administration not to release photographs of Osama bin Laden’s dead body for public scrutiny. 

Harvard Law School Professor Philip Heymann contends that the crisis in Mexico involving drug cartels needs to be examined from the broader perspective of organized crime and its use of violence—not just as a drug-trafficking issue. For the second year in a row, a working group was assembled to take the next step of addressing the issues in very concrete detail. About 30 law-enforcement officials, prosecutors, investigators, legal scholars and proponents of treatment and prevention were in attendance.

In the Washington Post ‘Opinions’ section on May 5, Harvard Law School Professor Charles Fried and his son, Suffolk University Philosophy Department Chair Gregory Fried, discussed the killing of Osama bin Laden. The authors argued that torture apologists are undermining what the pair call a “great victory” for the U.S. by calling into question the circumstances under which bin Laden was felled during the firefight in his compound in Pakistan—a “risible” notion, by the authors’ standards.