Richard J. Lazarus ’79
New expertise across a broad spectrum of legal fields, from environmental law to corporate law
Dean Martha Minow continues to grow the faculty with five new appointments. Minow describe the latest hires as "superb teachers who will bring their enormous talent and wisdom to the HLS community.
Richard Lazarus, professor of law
Richard J. Lazarus ’79, one of the nation’s foremost experts on environmental law and a leading practitioner in the U.S. Supreme Court, joined the Harvard Law School faculty this summer as a tenured professor.
Lazarus most recently was the Justice William J. Brennan, Jr. Professor of Law and faculty co-director of the Supreme Court Institute at Georgetown University Law Center, where he taught since 1996. He received the Frank Flegal Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2002. He also served as executive director of the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling, appointed by President Barack Obama ’91.
Prior to Georgetown, he was a member of the faculty at Indiana University Bloomington and at Washington University, where law students honored him with their “best teacher” award, and he was a visiting professor at several law schools, including HLS, where he most recently taught during the winter 2010 term.
Lazarus has co-taught summer programs nationally and internationally on the history of the Supreme Court with Chief Justice of the United States John G. Roberts Jr. ’79.
He previously worked for the U.S. Department of Justice, in the Environment and Natural Resources Division and in the Solicitor General’s Office, where he was assistant to the solicitor general. He has represented the United States, state and local governments, and environmental groups in the U.S. Supreme Court in approximately 40 cases.
Lazarus’ 2004 publication, “The Making of Environmental Law” (University of Chicago Press), is widely hailed as the definitive history of the emergence and evolution of modern environmental law in the United States. He is the principal author of “Deep Water: The Gulf Oil Disaster and the Future of Offshore Drilling” (2011).
He has a forthcoming article in the University of Illinois Law Review, and recently published articles in the Cornell Law Review, Yale Law Journal Online, and San Diego Journal of Climate and Energy Law. Environmental law professors selected his 2009 Cornell Law Review article as one of the best published that year—an award he has received for many of his publications.
Lazarus holds a B.S. in chemistry and a B.A. in economics from the University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign), in addition to a J.D. from HLS. He also attended Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he was a special student in economics and an advisee of Professor Robert Solow, the Nobel Prize-winning economist.
Mihir A. Desai, professor of law
Mihir A. Desai
Mihir A. Desai has accepted a joint appointment to the faculty of Harvard Law School as a tenured professor. He currently serves at Harvard Business School as the Mizuho Financial Group Professor of Finance, the senior associate dean for planning and university affairs, and the chair of doctoral programs.
An expert in tax policy, international finance and corporate finance, Desai was a visiting professor at HLS in 2009.
A recipient of the Student Association Award for teaching excellence from the HBS Class of 2001, he will continue to teach in the General Management Program and Executive Education Program at HBS.
Desai’s scholarship has appeared in leading publications on economics, finance and public economics, and he wrote “International Finance: A Casebook.”
A research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research in the Public Economics and Corporate Finance programs, Desai is on the advisory board of the International Tax Policy Forum and the NCAER-Brookings India Policy Reform. He also has served as an economic adviser for the ABA Task Force on International Tax Reform; an international research fellow for the Oxford University Centre for Business Taxation; an associate editor for the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy; and a referee for numerous economics and financial journals.
He worked at CS First Boston and McKinsey & Co. He has a B.A. in history and economics from Brown and a Ph.D. in political economy and an M.B.A. from Harvard. He was also a Fulbright Scholar to India.
Holger Spamann, assistant professor of law
Holger Spamann LL.M. ’01 S.J.D. ’09, an expert in corporate governance and finance, joined the faculty in July as an assistant professor. He is a former co-executive director of HLS’s Program on Corporate Governance, he co-taught Corporate and Securities Law Policy with Professor Lucian Bebchuk LL.M. ’80 S.J.D. ’84 in 2009, and he is a former corporate governance research fellow.
Holger Spamann LL.M. ’01 S.J.D. ’09
Spamann’s primary teaching interests include corporations, corporate finance and bankruptcy. His research has also involved securities regulation, law and economics, civil procedure, conflict of laws, comparative law, EU law and international economic law.
Prior to entering the S.J.D. program at HLS, Spamann was a trainee (“Referendar”) under the direction of the Court of Appeals for the State of Hamburg in Germany. He also has worked in private equity M&A as an associate at Debevoise & Plimpton in New York City, and as a junior researcher for the Max-Planck-Institute for Foreign and Private International Law in Hamburg.
Spamann has written and co-written articles in the Reviews of Financial Studies, the BYU Law Review, the Yale Journal on Regulation, the Georgetown Law Journal, the American Journal of Comparative Law, the Review of International Economics and the journals of Legal Analysis, Institutional and Theoretical Economics, and World Trade.
As an LL.M. and S.J.D. student at HLS, Spamann won a number of writing accolades, including two Brudney Prizes for Best Corporate Law Paper, two Olin Prizes for Best Law & Economics Paper, and the Addison Brown Prize for Best Private International Law Paper.
He earned an A.M. in economics from Harvard and expects to earn his Ph.D. in economics this year. He holds a B.Sc. from the London School of Economics as well as a German law degree from the University of Hamburg and a French law degree from the University of Paris.
Robert Greenwald, clinical professor of law
Robert Greenwald
Robert Greenwald, director of Harvard Law School’s Health Law and Policy Clinic, has been promoted to full clinical professor.
Greenwald has taught at HLS since 1989. He is currently a senior clinical instructor, a lecturer on law, and managing director of the WilmerHale Legal Services Center in Jamaica Plain.
He founded the Health Law and Policy Clinic in 1987 as the nation’s first law school-based AIDS law clinic. Under Greenwald’s leadership, the clinic is at the forefront of health law and policy issues, and it was actively engaged in the design and passage of 2010 federal health reform legislation that expands Medicaid coverage to more than 15 million low-income, uninsured Americans. The clinic remains very active in implementation of federal health care reform.
In February, Greenwald was awarded a Positive Leadership Award for the third year in a row from the National Association of People with AIDS. He has also received awards recognizing the importance of his work from HLS Lambda and the Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review, Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders, and the cities of Boston and Cambridge.
He is a member of the Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS, the co-chair of the HIV Health Care Access Working Group, and a board member of the the Bessie Tartt Wilson Initiative for Children and the Technical Assistance Collaborative for housing.
He holds a B.A. from Vassar College and a J.D. from Northeastern.
Vicki C. Jackson, professor of law
Vicki C. Jackson, a leading expert on U.S. constitutional law, comparative constitutional law and federal courts, joined the faculty this summer as a tenured professor. She is the school’s first Thurgood Marshall Professor of Constitutional Law.
Vicki C. Jackson
Most recently the Carmack Waterhouse Professor of Constitutional Law at the Georgetown University Law Center, she has taught courses on constitutional law, comparative constitutional law, gender equality, federal courts and the Supreme Court. She joined the Georgetown faculty in 1985.
Jackson was a visiting professor at HLS and at Columbia Law School.
At Georgetown, she served as associate dean for Transnational Legal Studies, for Research, and for Research and Academic Programs. She also chaired the appointments and academic standards committees. She was a co-recipient of Georgetown’s Frank Flegal Award for Excellence in Teaching.
Jackson was a deputy assistant attorney general in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, and she has been a board member of the International Association of Constitutional Law since 1999. She also served as co-chair of the Special Committee on Gender of the D.C. Circuit Task Force on Gender, Race and Ethnic Bias.
Earlier in her career, she was a partner at Rogovin, Huge & Lenzner in Washington, D.C. She served as a law clerk to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall; to Judge Murray Gurfein, U.S. Court of Appeals, 2nd Circuit; and to Judge Morris Lasker, U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York.
She has written five books, including two with HLS Professor Mark Tushnet: “Comparative Constitutional Law” and “Defining the Field of Comparative Constitutional Law,” an edited collection of essays.
She holds a B.A. in history, summa cum laude, from Yale. She earned her J.D. from Yale, where she was an editor of the Yale Law Journal.