International

“Put children’s safety first,” an op-ed by Harvard Law School Professor Elizabeth Bartholet ’65 about the adoption crisis in the wake of the Haiti earthquake, appeared in the Feb. 1 edition of the New York Times Room for Debate Blog.

At the southwestern tip of the Amazon, in Porto Velho, Rondônia, Brazil, stands Urso Branco, a prison notorious for deadly human rights violations. It’s nowhere anyone would choose to be. But it was into this dank, dark, and volatile world that Clara Long ’11, Fernando Delgado ’08, and James Cavallaro, executive director of Harvard Law School’s Human Rights Program, insisted on going.

On Jan. 15, The New York Times included commentary by HLS Professor Jonathan Zittrain ’95 on “What web sites can do” in the wake of Google’s recent announcement that it would no longer censor search results in China.

“Haiti’s Angry God,” an op-ed by Pooja Bhatia ’06, appeared in the Jan. 14 edition of the New York Times. Bhatia is currently living in Port-au-Prince as a fellow at the Institute of Current World Affairs. A former Wall Street Journal reporter, Bhatia is also filing reports and was interviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

Since U.S. forces started taking alleged terrorists to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the task of crafting American detention policy has migrated decisively from the executive branch to federal judges. These judges, not experts in terrorism or national security and not politically accountable to the electorate, inherited this responsibility because of the Supreme Court's intervention in detention policy. Over time they maintained it because legislative and executive officials of both political parties refused to craft a comprehensive legislative approach to this novel set of problems that cries out for decisive lawmaking.

Harvard Law School Professor Hal Scott's op-ed, “Do we really need a systemic regulator?” appeared in the December 11, 2009, edition of the Wall Street Journal.

This year's outbreak of the H1N1 influenza has demonstrated that contagions know few boundaries and spread wherever they can find an available host. Likewise, because of their broad jurisdictional rules, U.S. courts can be easy targets for "forum shopping" by foreign plaintiffs seeking redress against American companies for torts they claim have taken place abroad.

HLS Professor David Kennedy ’80, Faculty Director of the new Institute for Global Law and Policy at Harvard Law School, co-chaired a major conference on financial regulation in China on October 29 and 30, at Peking University in Beijing. 

The U.S. District Court in the Southern District of Florida has ruled that the claims for crimes against humanity and extrajudicial killings could move forward in two related U.S. cases against former Bolivian President Gonzalo Daniel Sánchez de Lozada Sánchez Bustamante (Sánchez de Lozada) and former Bolivian Defense Minister Jose Carlos Sánchez Berzaín (Sánchez Berzaín). The International Human Rights Clinic at Harvard Law School is part of the legal team that filed the two complaints against Sánchez de Lozada and Sánchez Berzaín.

In commemoration of the 25th anniversary of the UN’s Human Rights Program, the UN’s highest human rights official, Navanethem Pillay, LL.M. ’82 S.J.D. ’88, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, came to Harvard Law School to discuss her current position as a human rights diplomat and how it differs from her previous roles as a judge and an impassioned activist.

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.

A team of Harvard Law students won first place at the 4th National Puerto Rico Trial Advocacy Competition in San Juan. The prestigious “invitation only” competition was sponsored by the Inter-American University of Puerto Rico School of Law and was held at the Old San Juan District Courthouse Oct. 31-Nov. 1.

 HLS Professor John Coates'  article “A costly lesson in the rule of ‘loser pays’ appeared in the Nov. 1, 2009, edition of The Financial Times. On September 3, Coates joined more than 20 other corporate law and finance professors in filing an amici curiae brief in the case of Jones et al. v. Harris Associates, now pending before the U.S. Supreme Court.

This weekend, senior financial and government leaders from the United States and Japan will gather in Armonk, N.Y., to examine challenges facing the financial sectors of the two countries. The “Symposium on Building the Financial System of the 21st Century: An Agenda for Japan and the United States” is organized by Harvard Law School’s Program on International Financial Systems (PIFS) and the International House of Japan (I-House).

President Barack Obama ’91 is the recipient of the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize. Cited for “his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and co-operation between peoples,” Obama becomes the third sitting U.S. president to receive the award, along with Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson.

Camp Julien is surrounded by reminders of Afghanistan’s past. The coalition military base--which sits in the hills south of Kabul, just high enough to rise above the thick cloud of smog that perpetually blankets the city--is flanked by two European-style palaces built in the 1920s by the modernizing King Amanullah. Home to Soviet troops and mujahedin during the past decades of war, the now-crumbling palaces are littered with bullet holes and decorated with graffiti in multiple languages. Uphill from Julien is the old Russian officers’ club, dating from the Soviet invasion and featuring a recently refilled swimming pool that overlooks the southern half of the city. The pool is said to have been the site of executions in the 1990s; the condemned were apparently shot off the diving board.



A group of Harvard Law School professors gathered on Sept. 29 for a panel discussion on the year-old global economic crisis and the prospects for recovery. 


In February 2007, Harvard Law School’s Human Rights Program issued a report on gang violence in El Salvador, "No Place to Hide: Gang, State, and Clandestine Violence in El Salvador."

Diego, Anastasia and Juan (not their real names) are undocumented immigrants. They are seeking asylum in the United States because if they return to El Salvador, they say they will almost certainly be killed.

President Barack H. Obama ’91 has nominated Marisa Lago ’82 as assistant secretary of the Treasury for international markets and development.

Two Nobel Prize-winning economists—Harvard Professor Amartya Sen and Michael Spence—joined development expert Clotilde Fonseca, and HLS Professor Yochai Benkler ’94, co-director of the HLS Berkman Center for Internet & Society, for a discussion of the role of information and communication technologies in human development, growth and poverty reduction.