International

Thirteen students from Harvard Law School recently won honors at the 2009 Willem C. Vis International Commercial Arbitration Moot Competitions in Vienna and Hong Kong.

On April 24, HLS hosted a panel discussion titled “The International Face of Harvard Law School.” The panel, moderated by Professor William Alford ’77, included John F. Cogan, Jr. ’52 and four current HLS students who described their experiences in the international law program at HLS.

On April 15, Venezuelan Supreme Court Justice Vegas Torrealba discussed his country’s justice system during a talk entitled, “Role of Human Rights, Gender Equality, and Race in Venezuelan Law.” The event was sponsored by the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice.

The International Human Rights Clinic at Harvard Law School’s Human Rights Program has been working since 2005 on corporate Alien Tort Statute (ATS) litigation involving human rights abuses committed in apartheid South Africa. 

The following article, written by Professor John Palfrey ’01, entitled, “Internet arms race,” appeared in the May/June 2009 issue of the MIT Technology review.

The following op-ed, “Rights case gone wrong,” co-written by Harvard Law School Professor Jack Goldsmith and Duke Law School Professor Curtis Bradley, was published in the April 19, 2009, edition of the Washington Post.

At the Computer Emergency Response Team Coordination Center’s 20th Anniversary Technical Symposium, Harvard Law School Professor Jonathan Zittrain ’95 discussed why the Internet’s once-celebrated openness has led to the now regularly occurring security threats, and sketched solutions to deal with these threats.

Harvard Law School Professor Elizabeth Bartholet ’65 has issued a public letter in support of international adoption as news that a court in Malawi denied a petition for adoption by the entertainer Madonna. Bartholet was joined in the statement by a  group of experts in child welfare. The text of the letter is below.

Leaders from the financial sectors of Europe and United States have gathered in Torino, Italy, this week to examine issues affecting their financial markets.

Hauwa Ibrahim first came to international attention in 2003 when she won an appeal for Amina Lawal, a Nigerian woman convicted of adultery and sentenced to death by stoning under Sharia law. Ibrahim has now been involved with more than 150 such cases—using Sharia law to fight Sharia penalties.

On Friday, March 6, the Harvard International Law Journal brought together business and nonprofit leaders and academics from a wide range of international legal practices for a conference on “The International Lawyer’s Guide to Development: Current Problems, Future Solutions.”

A day-long symposium on the current status of immigration law drew immigration lawyers, policymakers and other experts from around the country to discuss a wide range of issues, from undocumented aliens to under-resourced courts and controversial enforcement methods.

A gift of $6 million from John F. Cogan, Jr. ’52 will be used in support of Harvard Law School’s International Legal Studies (ILS) program, Dean Elena Kagan ’86 announced today.

For those who work in the field of human rights during times of war, Afghanistan is the front line. For the past year, Erica Gaston ’07 has lived in Kabul as a Henigson Human Rights Fellow, assisting victims of the war and studying the conflict.

James Cavallaro, clinical professor and executive director of the Human Rights Program, has litigated numerous cases before the Inter-American Court, Latin America’s human rights court.

Christopher Rogers ’09 has spent the better part of the past year in HLS’s International Human Rights Clinic working on issues related to cluster munitions, particularly surrounding the creation of the Convention on Cluster Munitions.

The following article written by HLS Professor Noah Feldman, “Fighting the last war,” was published in the Nov. 30, 2008, edition of The New York Times Magazine. He is a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Sheela Murthy LL.M. ’87 founded the Murthy Law Firm in Baltimore County, Md., in 1994. Her firm, of which she is managing partner and president, employs 14 lawyers who primarily practice U.S. immigration law.

Like so many of his classmates, when Jay Munir graduated from Harvard Law School in June 2001, he was headed for a job as a litigator at a large firm. If someone had asked him the standard interview question, Where do you see yourself in five years? his answer certainly would not have been, “Anbar Province, Iraq.”

As a teenager growing up in a suburb of Chicago, Susan D. Page ’89 already knew she wanted to live overseas: “I think it was an early reflection of my feelings about the U.S. and how I fit in. I have never felt like it’s really been home.”

High in the Andes mountains, five Harvard Law School alumni are changing the way law professors in Colombia are trained—and they are using HLS as a model.