International

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.

HLS Lecturer on Law Juan Zarate ’97 was interviewed in the Washington Post today on national security threats after Osama bin Laden's death. From 2005 to 2009, Zarate served as the deputy assistant to the President and Deputy National Security Advisor for Combating Terrorism and was responsible for developing and implementing the U.S. Government’s counterterrorism strategy and policies related to transnational security threats.

It is imperative that governments uphold their obligation to ban cluster munitions absolutely, which is laid out in a treaty that more than 100 countries have joined, said a panel of disarmament experts in an HLS talk last week. Sponsored by the Harvard Law School Forum and the Harvard Human Rights Program, the panel described how the Convention on Cluster Munitions (CCM) was formed, and the challenges its advocates are facing despite its progress thus far.

In a talk at Harvard Law School on April 13, Carlos Castresana Fernandez, renowned Spanish prosecutor and head of the International Commission against Organized Crime in Guatemala (CICIG), offered an assessment of challenges facing the international body charged with investigating and prosecuting serious crime.

"Washington walks Ugandan tightrope," an op-ed co-authored by Harvard Law School Professor Charles Ogletree and University of Richmond School of Law Professor Jonathan Stubbs LL.M. ’79, was featured in the Opinion section of the April 27 edition of Politico.

Lobsang Sangay LL.M. '96 S.J.D. '04, the first Tibetan to attend Harvard Law School, has been certified as the new Kalon Tripa—a position often referred to as "prime minister" of a "Tibetan government-in-exile" headed by the Dalai Lama—following elections in March.

Thomas Bodström, former Swedish Minister for Justice, discussed several key pieces of legislation implicated in the legal actions taken against Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, at an event hosted by the Harvard European Law Association and the Center for European Studies on Friday, April 8, 2011.

Last month, Joseph G. Phillips ’12 and Joanne Box LL.M. ’11, students in the HLS International Human Rights Clinic (IHRC), attended a U.N. disarmament conference, where they met with diplomats to urge adoption of stronger international laws regarding the use of incendiary weapons. The students worked under the supervision of HLS Lecturer on Law and Clinical Instructor Bonnie Docherty ’01, who is one of the country’s leading legal experts on cluster munitions and has expanded her work to other disarmament issues, including incendiary weapons.

“Liberty and justice for all” and other quintessentially American ideals must be extended to Muslim-Americans in the face of anti-Islamic rhetoric in the nation, said Democratic Congressman Keith Ellison of Minnesota, the first Muslim to be elected to the United States Congress, during an event at the Harvard Law School on March 28.

In her remarks at the 14th annual Harvard Latino Law, Policy and Business Conference, to Cecilia Muñoz, Director of Intergovernmental Affairs at the White House, discussed the implications for both the Latino community and the country of the 2010 census results, which found that Latinos are now the nation's largest minority group.

Daniel Ellsberg, the former military analyst responsible for leaking the Pentagon Papers in 1971, addressed a Harvard Law School audience last week in a discussion of WikiLeaks, the organization that publishes classified documents submitted by whistleblowers worldwide. Once called “the most dangerous man in America,” Ellsberg, who will turn 80 on April 7, engaged in a dialog with Scott Horton, a lecturer at Columbia Law School, about why states keep secrets and the consequences of this secrecy.

The following op-ed by HLS Professor Alan Dershowitz “Norway to Jews: You’re Not Welcome Here,” appeared in the March 29, 2011 edition of the Wall Street Journal. He is the author of numerous books, including “The Trials of Zion,” “The Case for Moral Clarity: Israel, Hamas and Gaza,” and “Finding, Framing, and Hanging Jefferson: A Lost Letter, a Remarkable Discovery, and Freedom of Speech in an Age of Terrorism.”

Harvard Law School Professor Noah Feldman explained aspects of Sharia and Islam Law on a television program -- "Unwelcome: The Muslims Next Door" -- for CNN's In America series.The segment, which examines a Tennessee city torn apart as residents fight to block the construction of a large Islamic center, is part of a broadcast that will air on Saturday, April 2 at 8:00 p.m.

In a recent op-ed in Slate, Professor Jack Goldsmith makes the case for why President Obama's campaign of air and sea strikes against Libya is constitutional.  Goldsmith says that while he agrees with "many of the arguments from critics of the intervention that  President Obama acted imprudently in committing American forces to a conflict with an ill-defined national security justification,"  he does not believe that the military action is unconstitutional. Goldsmith's op-ed, "War Power," appeared in the March 21, 2011 edition of Slate. A former assistant attorney general in the Bush Administration, Goldsmith is the author of "The Terror Presidency: Law and Judgement Inside the Bush Administration" (New York : W.W. Norton & Company 2007).

Harvard Law School Professor Hal Scott’s Program on International Financial Systems is hosting the 9th annual “Symposium on Building the Financial System of the Twenty-first Century: An Agenda for Europe and the United States” this weekend in Hampshire, England.  Co-hosted by the Centre for European Policy Studies, the event will gather more than 100 senior executives and government officials from the financial industry, policymaking arenas, law, and academia.  

Harvard Law School Professor Laurence H. Tribe ’66 will receive an honorary doctorate on March 29 from Mexico’s Instituto Nacional de Ciencias Penales (INACIPE), or National Institute of Criminal Science. He will be the first American to receive the annual “honoris causa” doctorate since its inception in 1998.

Harvard Law Professor Yochai Benkler ’94 has released an article detailing U.S. government and news media censorship of WikiLeaks after the organization released the Afghan War Diary, the Iraq War Logs, and U.S. State department diplomatic cables in 2010. Among his key conclusions: The government overstated and overreacted to the WikiLeaks documents, and the mainstream news media followed suit by engaging in self-censorship. Benkler argues further that there is no sound Constitutional basis for a criminal prosecution of WikiLeaks or its leader, Julian Assange.

In a Mar. 8 talk sponsored by the Human Rights Program at Harvard Law School, Paul Hoffman, a leading litigator of claims brought under the Alien Tort Statute, offered a look at the history of lawsuits against corporations for their complicity in human rights violations—and a glimpse of some possible future developments.

The Harvard Law School Asian Pacific American Law Students Association hosted the 17th Annual National Asian Pacific American Conference on Law and Public Policy on February 25-26, 2011 with the assistance of the Harvard Kennedy School Asian American Policy Review.

When HLS Professor Clinical Professor Jim Cavallaro decided there should be "a structured means of studying the broad jurisprudence and practice of the Inter-American system,” he and Stephanie Brewer ’07 created an on-site course in San José, Costa Rica where students can learn the law on the ground from judges, practitioners and stakeholders in the system. This January, the 20 students enrolled in “Doctrine and Practice of the Inter-American Human Rights System” came away with a deeper understanding of that system—plus an immersion in the world of human rights adjudication.