Public Service

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.

Elizabeth “Libby” Benton ’11 is the winner of the 2011 Andrew L. Kaufman Pro Bono Service Award, after performing over 2,300 hours of free legal services while at HLS.  The Class of 2011 surpassed the HLS record for pro bono hours, performing a total of 366,204 hours, an average of 628 hours per student.

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.

Harvard Law School Professor Carol Steiker ’86 has been appointed by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court to a three-year term on the Committee for Public Counsel Services (CPCS). The 15-member committee oversees the statewide provision of public defense services and other legal representation for indigent persons in criminal and civil court cases and proceedings in Massachusetts.

Harvard Law School student Emily Inouye ’11 and alumna Cynthia Chandler ’95 have each received the Gary Bellow Public Service Award for their commitment to public interest and social justice work.

Harvard Law School Dean Martha Minow, who serves on the board of directors for the Legal Services Corporation (LSC), was selected as co-chair of an LSC task force to develop additional resources to help low-income Americans facing serious civil legal problems.

In an Apr. 4 op-ed published in The Boston Globe’s Opinion Blog “The Angle,” Harvard Law School Dean Martha Minow and co-author John Broderick (dean and president of the University of New Hampshire School of Law) address impending Congressional budget cuts that would force programs that provide pro bono legal aid to close their doors.

In a Mar. 28 panel discussion moderated by Harvard Law School lecturer and former Maine Attorney General Jim Tierney, Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley and Connecticut Attorney General George Jepsen ’80 sat down with HLS students to discuss challenges they face in office.

After countless hours of interviewing their client, digging through documents and working with experts to prepare for two court hearings, students in the Harvard Immigration and Refugee Clinic got what they were after: a grant of asylum.

On January 7, in a ruling that will likely affect the entire banking industry, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court found that Wells Fargo and US Bancorp had wrongly foreclosed on two homes because the banks could not prove that they owned the mortgages at the time of the foreclosure sales in July 2007. Max Weinstein, a Clinical Instructor at the Wilmer Hale Legal Services Center, represented one of the mortgagers, Antonio Ibanez.

Three faculty who served in the Obama administration, and recently returned to HLS, talk to writer Elaine McArdle about gridlock, being part of history, living life at warp speed and the day the Easter Bunny blacked out the White House.

In his first tour of duty in Iraq, in 2007, Marine Capt. Courtney Walsh LLM ’11 was one of two defense attorneys who represented Marines in Al Anbar Province charged with a range of infractions, from disciplinary violations to serious crimes tried in a court-martial.

William T. Coleman Jr. ’43 ('46), the venerable civil rights lawyer who served on the Brown v. Board of Education case, as counsel to the Warren Commission and as secretary of transportation in the Gerald Ford Administration, was a guest speaker at Harvard Law School on Dec. 1.

As a little girl in Berkeley, Calif., U.S. Navy Lieutenant Commander Sylvaine Wong LL.M. ’11 became enamored of the Navy when her dad took her each year to “Fleet Week” to clamber aboard aircraft carriers and visit other military craft.

For the first three months his battalion was stationed in Al Anbar Province in Iraq in early 2007, the situation was “highly kinetic,” recalls U.S. Marine Captain Siddhartha Velandy LL.M. ’11, with the Marines either under relentless attack or aggressively patrolling in order to create a secure environment.

Steven Schartup ’13 in a U.S. Army veteran who did two tours of duty in Iraq, one involving combat, and another couple of months in Kosovo in a peacekeeping operation.

It was between his junior and senior years at Princeton, in the summer of 2004 when the war in Iraq was not very old, that Graham Phillips ’13 decided to enlist in the U.S. Army.

U.S. Navy Lieutenant Commander Susan McGarvey LL.M.’ 11 was in the courthouse when Saddam Hussein was on trial for the Anfal Campaign, the genocide of Kurds that he ordered in the late 1980s.

As a U.S. Army intelligence officer stationed in Baghdad in 2006 and 2007, Ian Gore ’13 was a targeting officer, responsible for building “target packets” against enemy combatants: working with locals to find out who the enemies were, compiling evidence against them, explaining to the unit commander why a particular person should be arrested and detained, and describing the goals that would be achieved.