HLS News January 2004

• Student Wins Soros Justice Advocacy Fellowship

  Third-year Harvard Law School student O. Grace Bankole has been selected as a 2004 Soros Justice Advocacy Fellow. The fellowship funds lawyers, advocates and organizers who initiate litigation, public education, grassroots organizing and advocacy projects that will have a measurable impact on a host of criminal justice issues. Bankole intends use the two-year fellowship to create a program, Families Empowering Families, that will provide intensive legal and advocacy training to friends and families of Louisiana’s incarcerated children.

• Student Group Urges Investigation of Missing Sikhs

  Harvard Law Student Advocates for Human Rights, a student group that works closely with the law school’s Human Rights Program, has recently filed a friend of the court brief with the Indian National Human Rights Commission regarding the disappearance of thousands of Sikhs in Punjab by the Indian government in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The brief argues that international law requires the government to investigate thoroughly all allegations of disappearances and to accept and consider a wide variety of evidence in making its determinations.

• Amanda Leiter Named First Beagle Fellow

  Amanda Leiter has been named the first recipient of the Beagle/Harvard Law School fellowship. A 2000 graduate of HLS, Leiter will begin her fellowship at the conclusion of her current clerkship with U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens.

• Faculty Submit Brief on Military Recruiting

  Yesterday 54 members of the Harvard Law faculty filed a friend of the court brief in support of the Forum for Academic and Institutional Rights, the Society of American Law Teachers and other plaintiffs in their challenge to the Solomon Amendment as enforced by the Department of Defense. In 2002, the Department of Defense had threatened to withdraw federal funding from universities that did not provide access to law students by military recruiters.

• Tribe Submits Brief in Support of Gay Marriage

  Harvard Law School Professor Laurence Tribe today submitted a friend of the court brief urging the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court to reject calls for a civil union law. The brief argues that the court's language in its recent decision in Goodridge v. Department of Public Health was unambiguous in its conclusion that state law could no longer prohibit gay marriages. Additionally, the brief contends that an advisory opinion allowing that prohibition to remain in effect but allowing "civil unions" instead would harm the court's credibility and hurt its ability to preserve the rule of law. Ninety of the nation's most distinguished constitutional scholars and legal historians signed the brief.

• Glendon on SJC Gay Marriage Ruling

  The alternative, roughly stated, is this: Reaffirm and clarify the current marriage statute to define marriage as between one man and one woman. Include within the re-enactment express legislative findings, stating clearly the rational bases for reserving the status of marriage to one man and one woman. We believe that the SJC, by its own language and the limited nature of its reasoning in Goodridge, invites just this response as an alternative to recognizing same-sex marriages.