National and International Security

Harvard Law School’s Immigration and Refugee Clinical Program has released a report on the effects of President Trump’s Executive Orders on people seeking asylum protection in the United States under long-standing provisions of U.S. and international law, including refugee law and the Convention Against Torture.

The Harvard Immigration and Refugee Clinical Program has been addressing the legal concerns of Harvard students, faculty, staff, and individuals affected in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts by recent executive action on immigration.

A look back at 2016, highlights of the people who visited, events that took place and everyday life at Harvard Law School.

Rebecca Tushnet, a leading First Amendment scholar, will join the faculty of Harvard Law School as the inaugural Frank Stanton Professor of First Amendment Law.

HLS students Tony Garofano LL.M. ’17 and Sarah Grant ’19 spoke with writers for Harvard Law Today about their experiences serving in the military and studying at Harvard Law.

In commemoration of the 15th anniversary of 9/11, Harvard Law School Dean Martha Minow asked faculty, alumni and staff to share brief personal reflections about that day and the post-9/11 world in which we live.

In a speech lasting six minutes and one second, Khizr Khan, LL.M. ’86, whose son Capt. Humayun Khan was killed in Iraq, stepped out from behind the curtain of private pain and into the public spotlight, attracting worldwide attention.

A number of new fellows, faculty associates, and affiliates will join the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University for the 2016-2017 academic year.

Naz K. Modirzadeh '02, the founding director of the Harvard Law School Program on International Law and Armed Conflict (PILAC), has been appointed as a professor of practice at Harvard Law School.

For more than seven years, John Carlin ’99 has been at the center of the most sensitive counterterrorism cases, which have often involved tricky technological questions—first as an adviser to FBI Director Robert Mueller and then at the National Security Division.

The Internet of Things may be about to change our lives as radically as the Internet itself did 20 years ago. The implications for privacy, national security, human rights, cyberespionage and the economy are staggering.

For more than half a century, Phil Heymann has served the nation— and Harvard Law School—with distinction.

When Wendy Sherman, former under secretary of state for political affairs, was in the midst of negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program, she often felt that her team was playing “several games of multidimensional chess at the same time.” On April 20, Sherman delivered a guest lecture to the Harvard Law School Negotiation Workshop.

On April 12, students in Professor of Practice Urs Gasser’s Spring 2016 Comparative Online Privacy Seminar at Harvard Law School hosted a student-led mini-symposium on data privacy in the U.S. and the EU with experts from private companies, law firms, and academia.

On April 1, Harvard Law School hosted a conference on 'Presidential Power in an Era of Polarized Conflict,' a daylong gathering in which experts from both sides of the aisle debated the president’s power in foreign and domestic affairs, and in issues of enforcement or non-enforcement.

Gabriella Blum LL.M. ’01 S.J.D. ’03, Rita E. Hauser Professor of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law at Harvard Law School has been named a 2016 Andrew Carnegie Fellow by the Carnegie Corporation of New York.

In a report issued last week, the Harvard Law School International Human Rights Clinic and Human Rights Watch call for countries to retain meaningful human control over weapons systems and ban fully autonomous weapons, also known as 'killer robots.'

Harvard Law School Visiting Lecturer Juan Carlos Zarate ’97, a former deputy national security adviser in the George W. Bush administration and a former assistant secretary of the U.S. Treasury for terrorist financing and financial crimes, recently spoke with The Harvard Gazette about the problem of money-laundering in the real estate industry—the scope of it, and what new oversight might portend.

How can you defend a foreigner who came to the United States with the likely intent of causing harm to Americans? For attorney James B. Donovan, a 1940 graduate of Harvard Law School, the real question at the height of the Cold War was: How can you not?

Harvard Law School hosted the first-ever Legal, Cultural and Strategic Issues in Counterterror Operations Symposium bringing together military officers from the 3rd Legal Operations Detachment and academic scholars whose work focuses on areas of Islamic and human rights law as well as on cultural and international security issues.

For Bonnie Docherty, a lecturer on law and a senior instructor at the International Human Rights Clinic at Harvard Law School, the battle to protect civilians from suffering caused by armed conflicts continues.

John P. Carlin ’99, assistant attorney general for National Security, spoke last week at Harvard Law School on the National Security Cyber Threat, at an event hosted by the Harvard National Security Journal.

It was with tragic timeliness that Professor Patrick Weil discussed “After the Paris Attacks: What Is the Future for French Society?” on Wednesday, November 18 at Harvard Law School.

Harvard students who have served in the various branches of the Armed Forces represent a diverse range of backgrounds and experience, but all have at least one thing in common: a profound dedication to serving the nation, under the most perilous of circumstances.

Delivering the 2015 Disabled American Veterans (DAV) Distinguished Lecture at Harvard Law School on Oct. 22, Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus ’75 told attendees that “one of my proudest moments as Secretary” was the reinstatement of the Reserve Officers Training Program on the Harvard campus in 2011.

After 15 years in Congress, Adam Schiff has emerged as a leading Democratic voice on national security.

“Seattle Justice: The Rise and Fall of the Police Payoff System in Seattle,” by Christopher T. Bayley ’66 (Sasquatch Books). In the early 1970s, as the newly…

Doctors who provide medical assistance to people labeled terrorists are increasingly vulnerable to prosecution in the United States and other Western democracies, according to a law briefing by the Harvard Law School Program on International Law and Armed Conflict (PILAC).

Mohammad Hamdy, an S.J.D. candidate at Harvard Law, was selected by the American Society of International Law (ASIL) as a 2015 Helton Fellow.

Daniel J. Meltzer '75, a renowned legal scholar and expert on federal courts and criminal procedure, and a valued legal advisor to President Barack Obama ’91, died on May 24, after a courageous battle with cancer. Meltzer was the Story Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, where he served on the faculty since 1982.

In a new world of technology, Gabriella Blum and Benjamin Wittes argue, we are more powerful and more vulnerable than ever

Vera Mironova, a graduate research fellow at Harvard Law School’s Program on Negotiation, was one of the lead authors of the “Voices of Syria” project, which covered topics such as current living situations, safety concerns, the future role of religion — among other key issues in Syria’s government. Mironova, a fifth-year year Ph.D. candidate at the University of Maryland, oversaw and coordinated the operation on the ground. Her goal: to capture the civil war in its most raw form.

The value of a clear understanding of your country’s objectives and the power of personal relationships — along with the wisdom of not drinking too much lemonade — were among the insights former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright shared with an audience at Harvard Law School's on April 2.

In a recent interview in the Harvard Gazette, Harvard Law School Professor Noah Feldman, Harvard Kennedy School Professor Nicholas Burns, and Wall Street Journalist Farnaz Fassihi offer their analyses of the recent conflicts in the Middle East and the historic political, social, and military transformation taking place in the region.

In a talk sponsored by International Legal Studies on February 11, former NPR correspondent Sarah Chayes, currently senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment, spoke to HLS students about the links, historical and current, between corruption and global security.

In a question-and-answer session with Dean Martha Minow at Harvard Law School on Nov. 6, former Congressman Jane Harman '69 reflected on her political career and discussed a range of issues from the fallout from the midterm elections to U.S. intelligence, foreign policy and the evolving threat of terrorism.

At the inaugural Disabled American Veterans Distinguished Speaker Series at Harvard Law School, U.S. Secretary of Veterans Affairs Robert McDonald said the troubled agency is making progress in getting its house in order, citing more — and more timely — appointments and authorizations to see private doctors for veterans who live far from VA hospitals.

During World War I, about 400,000 “enemy aliens” were imprisoned by all sides in camps on nearly every continent. During that time, Germany’s only exclusively civilian prison camp, Ruhleben Gefangenenlager, became a model of civil functionality.

Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger visited the Harvard Law School campus last week to share some of the lessons learned as adviser to Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford.

Credit: Jon Chase/Harvard Staff Photographer Harvard Law School’s Noah Feldman (from right) joined NPR correspondent Deborah Amos and Professor Kristen Stilt to discuss the fast-moving…

Harvard Law School Professor David J. Barron '94, an expert in administrative law and the separation of powers, has been confirmed by the U.S. Senate to the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit.

Ambassador Tommy Koh LL.M. ’64 of Singapore was recently presented with the 2014 Great Negotiator Award by the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School and the Harvard Kennedy School’s Future of Diplomacy Project at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs.

We follow 5 clinical students into the lab, the barbershop and the labyrinth of condominium governance.

For Kristin Fleschner ’14, running in next week’s Boston Marathon is a way to fight back against the bombing that terrorized last year’s runners. She has worked for the federal government in national security since 2008, and she’ll continue her work for the federal government after she graduates from Harvard Law School this spring.

On March 25, Ben Wizner, director of the ACLU Speech, Privacy & Technology Project, came to Harvard Law School to discuss his experience as Edward Snowden's legal advisor at an event sponsored by the Harvard Journal of Law and Technology, Harvard National Security Law Association, Harvard Law School National Security Journal, Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review, Unbound: Harvard Journal of the Legal Left, the HLS American Constitution Society and the HLS American Civil Liberties Union.

Three Harvard Law professors and a Harvard Law alum recently participated in debates on Intelligence Squared, a public policy debate series airing on PBS.

On Tuesday, Harvard Law School Professor Cass Sunstein, a member of a five-person advisory panel created by President Obama to make a sweeping review of U.S. surveillance activities, discussed the group’s efforts and the 46 recommendations it released last month, including major reforms to the way the intelligence community does business.