Harvard Law Today Archives

Read the current issue and back issues from July 2008 to present.

April 2008

Harvard Law School launches new Public Service Initiative
In a move that will further strengthen its commitment to public service, Harvard Law School announced that it will pay the third year of tuition for all future students who commit to work in public service for five years following graduation. Dean Elena Kagan ’86 announced the new program following a three-day “Celebration of Public Interest,” which brought more than 600 alumni back to the HLS campus.

shield Student Spotlight: A young entrepreneur builds a startup to aid the neediest
Last January, Andrew Klaber '09 was invited to Davos, Switzerland, to participate in the World Economic Forum with the world’s elite business, political and intellectual leaders. In a panel discussion about innovations in leadership, Klaber brought his message of social entrepreneurship to the world stage.

John Palfrey Faculty Q&A: Untangling the Web
Since its inception, Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet & Society has helped foster innovation on the Web, especially as the Internet has evolved into a more interactive medium. Executive Director John G. Palfrey Jr. '01 talked to HLT about the center's role in developing "Web 2.0."

shield FCC comes to HLS for hearing on Internet openess
The U.S. Federal Communications Commission was on the Harvard Law School campus today to hear testimony about whether or not Internet service providers deliberately blocked users from sharing files online. In a packed Ames Courtroom, the five commissioners heard from representatives of Comcast and Verizon about their network management practices, as well as from academics and small business owners who urged more freedom on the Internet.

Yochai Benkler HLS supplies legal ammunition in Supreme Court case
When the U.S. Supreme Court took up a landmark case on the constitutionality of Washington, D.C.’s handgun ban in March, a trio of Harvard Law students could claim modest credit for helping shape the argument. The students assisted lawyers arguing for preserving the ban in the gun-control case—D.C. v. Heller—as part of their work in a new clinical course this year, Supreme Court and Appellate Litigation.

Additional Content

January 2008

Challenging orthodoxies: Six questions for Professor Noah Feldman
Harvard Law Today recently caught up with Professor Noah Feldman, who joined the faculty in 2007. His interests include constitutional law -- with a special focus on the interplay between law and religion -- and international and comparative law. He is fluent in four languages, including Arabic, and he served as an adviser to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq during the drafting of Iraq’s constitution. His wide-ranging written work, which includes books, scholarly articles and journalism (he is a contributing editor of The New York Times Magazine), prompted New York Magazine to crown him “the next big public intellectual.”

shield Student Spotlight: Lam Ho on Traveling his own road
Lam Ho '08 was 6 years old when he and his family emigrated from Vietnam to the hardscrabble city of Brockton, Mass., where his parents worked on assembly lines and the family ate in soup kitchens and wore hand-me-downs from relatives. The happiest moment of his childhood, Ho says, was at a Christmas dinner for needy children, where he received a train set and a board game—the first toys he ever owned.

Yochai Benkler HLS campaigners hit the road in the push for votes
In the final weeks before New Hampshire’s first votes were cast in Dixville Notch, HLS campaigners were kicking it up a notch.Students working for Barack Obama '91 loaded onto buses and fanned out across New Hampshire. Over winter break, others went to Iowa to help get out the vote.

shield Terroism Panel: new laws are needed
How can law be enlisted more effectively in the fight against terrorism? What should Congress and the president do to ensure that the war on terror succeeds without violating the Constitution? These were teh questions addressed by a panel of terrorism experts at HLS on Nov. 13. The panelists discussed what changes should be adopted to better deal with the legal issues that have become controversial in dealing with the war on terror, including interrogation techniques, detention facilities, surveillance, and torture.

October 2007

Toiling in the land of the disappeared: For four HLS students, a summer of human rights work in Argentina
This summer in Buenos Aires, four HLS students found themselves sitting across a table from Carlos Menem, president of Argentina from 1989 to 1999. It was their opportunity, said Ariella Shkolnik ’09, “to ask poignant, difficult questions” about his controversial administration, widely accused of corruption and indifference to human rights abuses.

shield HLS makes 11 new faculty appointments
With 11 new appointments, the HLS faculty is now the largest—and strongest—in the Law School's history. This year's arrivals bring added depth and scope to a number of key areas including intellectual property, international law, constitutional law, law and economics, trusts and estates, civil procedure, and clinical instruction.

Yochai Benkler on the economic and political effects of the Internet
New faculty member Yochai Benkler ’94 is a noted expert on the effects of laws that regulate information production and exchange in the digital environment. He coined the term “commons-based peer production” to describe collaborative efforts such as free and open source software or Wikipedia.

April/May 2007

Bruce Wasserstein Wasserstein Family Gives $25 Million to Harvard Law School for Academic Center
The Wasserstein family has made a $25 million gift to Harvard Law School to support construction of Wasserstein Hall, the new academic center of the Harvard Law School campus. The gift is the second biggest in the Law School's history.

Breaking the cycle: Harvard Legal Aid Bureau helps client overcome domestic violence
Professor Elizabeth Bartholet '65, a leading child welfare expert, has taught family law at HLS for more than two decades. In 2004, she created the law school's Child Advocacy Program, which takes a multidisciplinary approach to the teaching of law relating to children's issues.

GaneshAntonin Scalia Student Spotlight: Ganesh Sitaraman '08
Imagine having the chance to attend college, and then go to work—perhaps helping the homeless, responding to national emergencies or providing international aid—knowing that your service will be rewarded with the complete forgiveness of your student debt.

Eric Swabb After war, vets bring new perspectives to HLS
On a recent morning in the Harkness Commons, few of the bustling Harvard Law School students could have guessed that at a table in their midst, Erik Swabb, a 1L, was recounting the first time he dodged enemy bullets.

February 2007

O'Connor assails 'pervasive attacks' on judges and judicial independence
Anti-judge sentiment is a focus of international judicial conference at HLS. Judges are under attack in ways that increasingly threaten the independence of the judicial branch, warned retired Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor at a conference of international jurists held at Harvard Law School in December.

Breaking the cycle: Harvard Legal Aid Bureau helps client overcome domestic violence
Ernestine carrasquillo had just graduated from high school in New Mexico and was on vacation in Boston when she met the man she would marry. "I was a naive 18-year-old country girl," she remembers.

At HLS, Scalia offers vigorous defense of originalism
With a reputation as the wittiest and perhaps the feistiest member of the United States Supreme Court, Associate Justice Antonin Scalia '60 did not disappoint the hundreds of HLS students who turned out to hear him at an Austin Hall appearance in November.

A leading scholar sets his sights on the gun issue
Professor Mark Tushnet, a constitutional law scholar and the leading American presence in the field of comparative constitutional law, joined the faculty last year.

December 2006

Heyman Fellows Celebrating 'proud and lively' careers
Leo wise '03 thought it might be hard to top his first assignment as a lawyer: quizzing witnesses as part of the trial team in the U.S. Justice Department's $280 billion tobacco case against Philip Morris. Then came his second assignment: joining the task force in the prosecutions of former Enron executives Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling.

Photo of Professor Clark After a hostile takeover bid, a friendly merger
When aol bought Time Warner in January 2000, experts predicted that the deal, the largest company merger in history, would create an unrivaled leader in the delivery of news, entertainment and other content in the rapidly exploding age of the Internet.

Langdell Hall Rethinking Langdell
In October, the Harvard Law School faculty unanimously adopted a reform of the first-year curriculum after a three-year process of study and consultation with legal scholars, faculty from other professional schools and practicing lawyers.

Security, liberty and the courts
Adrian Vermeule '93 joined the faculty this year as a professor of law, coming from the University of Chicago Law School. Prior to his tenure there, he served as a law clerk to Judge David Sentelle of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit and then for Associate Justice Antonin Scalia '60 of the U.S. Supreme Court. Here, he talks with HLT editor Robb London '86.

September 2006

HLS Seven new profs join HLS faculty ranks
It was another year of aggressive hiring by the Harvard Law faculty, resulting in seven new tenured and tenure-track professors joining the law school this fall. The new recruits will help to increase the breadth of the curriculum and reinforce areas of current strength.

NW Corner Building Planning for 'Northwest Corner' complex moving forward
After years of space planning and site analysis -- including a now-defunct proposal to move Harvard Law School across the Charles River -- the new "Northwest Corner" development is beginning to take shape, as architectural drawings of a 250,000- square-foot facility are now available to the law school community.

Photo of Neil Chayet The Story of a house
For 30 years, radio listeners have tuned in to hear Neil Chayet '63, creator of thousands of nationally syndicated segments called "Looking at the Law." His one-minute monologues, which typically focus on a recent court decision, are broadcast in hundreds of media markets and have made Chayet something of a legal translator for the general public.

Photo of Jody Freeman Conversation with Professor Jody Freeman on environmental law
Professor Jody Freeman LL.M. '91 S.J.D. '95 joined the faculty last year and became director of the Environmental Law Program. One year in, Freeman discusses her work and goals for the program with Harvard Law Today.

April 2006

HLS students seek justice for a Brazilian family
Clinical Professor James Cavallaro and three students traveled to Costa Rica for some of the most intensive legal work of the students' careers. The team spent day and night preparing to litigate a case before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in San Jose.

Beyond Brown v. Board: Interview with Professor Ken Mack
Professor Kenneth Mack '91 is an expert on American legal history, with a particular emphasis on the history of civil rights. Mack discusses his latest research with HLS Director of Communications Michael Armini.

Student Spotlight: Discovering home by studying law
For Aman Solomon '08, this year's Africa Summit is part professional, part personal. His grandfather was Ethiopia's minister of education. His father was born in Ethiopia but had to flee in the 1970s.

Teaching the teachers
Harvard law students and recent graduates thinking about careers in academia now have more opportunities to prepare for that path. For the first time, a dozen students will spend this summer as on-campus academic fellows sharpening their legal writing skills.

January 2006

Photo of John Palfrey The web weaver: Q & A with John Palfrey
John Palfrey, executive director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, was recently appointed clinical professor of law, a new position that recognizes his leadership in developing programs that give students real-world experience in cyberlaw litigation, client counseling, research and related issues. Here, Palfrey speaks with contributor Elaine McArdle about his work."

Student Spotlight: Kosovar student uses legal skills to help her war-torn homeland
"Friends told me that corporations law was easy," she said, sighing. Easy, perhaps, if you weren't born and raised in Kosovo, where the socialist economy collapsed completely in the 1990s, during the military conflict between Serbians and Kosovar Albanians that resulted in at least 2,000 deaths and the displacement of 90 percent of the population.

November 2005

Obama leads focus on Katrina aftermath during Celebration of Black Alumni
After Hurricane Katrina, U.S. Sen. Barack Obama '91 challenged black alumni to ask, "Are we doing everything we can?" 'Promises to keep.' The 2005 celebration of Black Alumni, held at HLS in mid-September, was the second chapter in a story that began five years earlier. Sharon E. Jones '82 remembers the excitement she and other participants felt in 2000 during the first Celebration of Black Alumni: a sense that they were making history.

The Professional: Q & A with Professor Wilkins
Professor David Wilkins directs the Program on the Legal Profession and its affiliate, the Center on Lawyers and the Professional Services Industry, at HLS. Here he discusses recent trends and pressures in the profession with staff writer Mary Bridges.

HLS student teams up with former college president in new book
While most undergraduates spend college learning from teachers, Martin Kurzweil '07 spent much of his time in college practicing how to be one. During his undergraduate years at Harvard, Kurzweil spent up to four days a week tutoring students at area middle schools. While he still talks about making the proverbial difference in adolescents' lives, the experience of working in urban public schools clued him in to more pervasive social and political problems. "I really enjoyed being in the schools, connecting with kids," Kurzweil explained.

September 2005

Tribe reflects on Supreme legacies
With the impending departure of Sandra Day O'Connor from the Supreme Court—and the end of the Rehnquist era—Professor Laurence Tribe '66 talks about legacies. Tribe sat down recently with Harvard Law Bulletin Editor Robb London '86 for a discussion of the Rehnquist Court, and why attempting a theoretical synthesis of recent Court decisions is proving more difficult than usual.

HLS student gets a front-row seat for U.N. action
Fifteen ambassadors took their seats at the round Security Council table. Two rows behind U.S. Ambassador Gerald Scott sat Alex Wong '07, summer intern at the U.S. Mission to the United Nations.

Chayes Fellows go global to see the law in action
This summer, while some classmates in New York and Boston drafted briefs or finalized memos in high-rise office buildings, the 28 Harvard Law students selected as 2005 Chayes Fellows encountered entirely different challenges. Mary Weld '07, working in Sudan, had to brush off her computer every few minutes during the dust storm that blanketed Khartoum for four days. Alexandra Chirinos '07, working in Colombia, had a neighbor who threw furniture from his window onto the street below. Devin Brennan '07, in Hungary, could barely read the menus in local restaurants.

April 2005

HLS student writes book on Reagan's nuclear record
Paul Lettow was too young to vote for Ronald Reagan, but that hasn't kept the third-year law student from writing a book on Reagan's policies that is causing some to rethink the record of America's 40th president. "Ronald Reagan and His Quest to Abolish Nuclear Weapons" hit bookstores in February and earned praise in The New York Times for being "provocative, informative and largely persuasive."

Reality check for Compton attorney
It wasn't a makeover--it was a make-better. A team of decorators and their entourage of producers, assistants and camera crew members recently descended on the law office of Luz Herrera '99 for four days, while another set of designers whisked her away to a posh Los Angeles hotel for shopping, massages and manicures. Why was this young attorney getting the royal treatment?

Student Spotlight: Student's blog strikes chord, generates book deal
The debate raged online for almost a year: Who was Anonymous Lawyer? Was he real, or just the fictional character he claimed to be? He certainly seemed real enough to many readers of his Web log, anonymouslawyer.blogspot.com, where he posted cynical commentary about life in a large Los Angeles law firm.

January 2005

Breyer rebuts "originalists" in Tanner Lecture
Associate Justice Stephen Breyer of the U.S. Supreme Court delivered the 2004 Tanner Lecture on Human Values at Harvard University in November, sponsored by the Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics. The following is an edited version of Justice Breyer's text, which was published in the January 2005 issue of Harvard Law Today. In his remarks, Breyer called on judges to focus more on the Constitution's goal of an active, participatory democracy, and argued that the "originalist" approach to constitutional interpretation is sometimes at odds with that goal.

Student Wages Legal Battle to Protect Women from Forced Sterilization
The nurse demanded to know what Barbora Bukovska was doing in the hospital ward asking questions. Bukovska said she was a human rights lawyer and that she wanted to speak to the doctor in charge of the ward at this Eastern Slovakian hospital. But she never got a chance to talk.

Gerken on the Election: How We Fared
Shortly after the national elections of Nov. 2, Harvard Law Today asked Assistant Professor Heather Gerken for an assessment of the electoral process and whether the United States has remedied the deficiencies that surfaced in the 2000 election in Florida and elsewhere. Gerken, an expert on election law, tells HLT that, while we didn't relive the days of hanging chads and "undervotes," there are still serious problems.

December 2004

Bebchuk on Making Directors Accountable
After a decade of soaring to unprecedented levels, executive compensation is the subject of an intense debate. In their just published "Pay without Performance: The Unfulfilled Promise of Executive Compensation," HLS Professor Lucian Bebchuk LL.M. '80 S.J.D. '84 and UC Berkeley School of Law Professor Jesse Fried '92 explore the causes and consequences of flawed compensation arrangements. Harvard Law Today interviewed Bebchuk about the book and his views on corporate governance reform.

Editors of Indian Law Handbook Convene
A team of Indian law experts met recently at Harvard Law School to finalize updates to Felix Cohen's landmark "Handbook of Federal Indian Law." Scholars consider the Cohen handbook--published in 1941--to be the leading text on federal Indian law. Cohen wrote the first edition while serving as an assistant solicitor in the Interior Department during the Roosevelt administration.

Alumni Score Victories in Congressional Races
Harvard Law alumni from both political parties won elections yesterday to gain or retain seats in the U.S. House and Senate. Perhaps the highest profile winner is Barack Obama, a Democrat who won a senate seat by a wide margin in Illinois. A member of the class of 1991, Obama will become one of 10 Harvard Law alumni in the U.S. Senate. Incumbent senators Michael Crapo '77 (R-Idaho), Russell Feingold '79 (D-Wis.), and Charles Schumer '74 (D-N.Y.) each won re-election. Senator Bob Graham '79 (D-Fla.) did not seek re-election.

September 2004

Students and Faculty Connect in First-Year Reading Groups
This semester, many first-year students at HLS are reading more than the typical load of cases and books on legal doctrine. The newly minted 1Ls are signing up for new first-year reading groups that cover everything from cyberlaw to the laws of war.

Debating the Debates
When the 2004 presidential debates begin this month, few will be watching more closely than George Farah '05. Indeed, he's worried that most American voters will be dozing before the first question is asked or, worse, "voting with their remotes" by clicking over to something more entertaining, like major league baseball.

Clinical Program in Human Rights Expanded to Meet Student Demand
A recent surge in student demand for human rights clinical work has led to a major expansion of the HLS Human Rights Program's Clinical Advocacy Project. Beginning this year, students will have greater opportunities to do hands-on, advocacy work in the human rights field.

April 2004

Harvard Law School Launches Program to Examine the 'Industry' of Law Practice
To better understand the transformation of legal practice from a profession traditionally made up of small independent firms to a multi-billion dollar global business, Harvard Law School has established the Program on Lawyers and the Professional Services Industry, the first program of its kind in the nation.

January 2004

School Wins Record Number of Skadden Fellowships
HLS students and recent graduates have won an unprecedented eight Skadden Fellowships to pursue public interest work. The awards represent the most given to applicants from any single law school in the 15-year history of the Skadden Fellowship Foundation.

HLS Professors Continue Collaboration with HBS Colleagues
Six Harvard Law School professors have joined with nine of their colleagues at Harvard Business School to comment on proposed Securities and Exchange Commission rules regarding shareholder access to corporate proxy elections. The letter represents a continued collaboration between faculty at HLS and HBS. The recently formed study group on corporate governance has been meeting once a month for the past year to analyze current corporate governance issues.

Q&A: Professor Fried on Senators, Judges and the Supreme Court
Professor Charles Fried, a former U.S. solicitor general and justice on the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court discusses judicial confirmation battles and his recent cases before the Supreme Court. Fried's book, "Saying What the Law Is: The Constitution in the Supreme Court," will be published in February.

September 2003

Corporate Law Professors Honored
Articles by Professors Lucian Bebchuk, John Coates, Guhan Subramanian, Reinier Kraakman and Mark Roe will be named among the top ten corporate and security law articles of 2002 in the upcoming issue of the Corporate Practice Commentator, a quarterly journal that reprints articles about corporations law. The articles were selected based upon a survey of corporate and securities law teachers across the nation.

Of Lawyers, Auditors and Ethics
Professor Bernard Wolfman discusses the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, recent tax cuts and whether law school does a good enough job teaching ethics.

May 2003

On Human Rights and Refugees
Professor Martha Minow has written extensively on issues relating to war crimes, refugees and human rights. She discusses these issues, the phone calls that changed her work and why she has stayed at Harvard Law School.

Lord of the Ring
It is another extremely cold Thursday afternoon in February, but Gene Gurkoff '04 is soaked with sweat. He's just returned to the top floor of Harvard's Malkin Athletic Center after running down--and then back up--five flights of stairs for the third time in 10 minutes, with almost a dozen other students running right behind.

March 2003

Joint Degree Programs Help Bring the University to the Law School
Harvard Law School is a big place. With more than 260 courses and 18 different research centers and programs, there are arguably more opportunities for students to pursue a wide range of academic interests at HLS than at any other law school. Students can take courses ranging from Abraham Lincoln and the Constitution to Wills and Estates; they can study cyberlaw at the Berkman Center or English law at the Selden Society.

Singer Helps Update Definitive Indian Law Book
In January, the Oneida Indian Nation made a $3 million gift to HLS, ensuring that the study and teaching of federal Indian law would be a permanent fixture at the school. But at least one member of the law school faculty has been immersed in the field for the better part of 15 years.

January 2003

The 'Appliancizing' of Technology
Assistant Professor Jonathan Zittrain '95, co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, discusses technology, the law and automatic dog washers.

Teaching While They Learn
On any given school day, 3L David Bloch may be learning Roman law or teaching Latin. When he's not in class at the law school, Bloch serves as a teaching assistant in Harvard's Classics department, teaching sections on Latin and Virgil's early poetry. He's just one of many HLS students who see both sides of the university's lecture halls. According to new statistics compiled by the Office of the J.D. Dean, last year more than 80 HLS students held positions as teaching assistants around the university. (This is in addition to the 62 HLS students who, as members of the Board of Student Advisers, lead workshops in the First Year Lawyering Program.) Most assist in teaching classes at Harvard College--where they are technically known as teaching "fellows"--and are most likely to teach in the Economics department.

Peace Broker
Lobsang Sangay first took to the streets to demonstrate against Chinese occupation of his family's native Tibet at the age of 14. In a conversation with some older Tibetans, Sangay heard one of them say, "Look at the way that the Chinese are treating us. What we Tibetans need is a lawyer to defend us." Sangay graduated from the University of Delhi Law Center in 1994 and then won a Fulbright scholarship to attend the LL.M. program at HLS. Since arriving at HLS, Sangay has worked to temper his approach, if not his views.

November 2002

Negotiating the Future of Ground Zero
An Oct. 6 conference run by the Harvard Law School Program on Negotiation, titled Negotiating Common Ground, sought to create a dialogue between such disparate views. Organized by a group of dispute resolution students from across numerous Harvard faculties including law, divinity, government and education, the conference brought together experts to discuss the various constraints on use of the space and to explore how dispute resolution professionals could assist the decision-making process.

A Global Law School
A discussion with Professor Bill Alford '77. Alford, director of the East Asian Legal Studies Program, was recently named associate dean for the Graduate Program and International Legal Studies.

To the Voters Go the Spoils
Jocelyn Benson '04 isn't waiting to finish law school to start changing the world. She's doing it in every free moment she has between her second-year classes, her duties as a resident tutor for Harvard College students and a research job with Professor Laurence Tribe '66. "Sometimes I go to class!" jokes Benson, while taking a break in Harkness Commons in early October. That's because her all-consuming focus since last winter has been electoral reform legislation proposed after the ballot debacle in the 2000 presidential election.

September 2002

Hands Across the World: for Summer Jobs, HLS Students Cross Cultures to Help People in Need
Students who journeyed to distant lands for summer jobs say their perspective on the law crossed borders that were geographic, cultural, and sometimes political.

The Art of Teaching: A Q&A with Lani Guinier
Certainly race is a source of stigma. It has been defined in terms of individual prejudice and the legal system trains us to identify individual bad actors or perpetrators. But Gerald Torres and I also feel that race has an untapped potential to function as an asset, as a diagnostic tool. Race can help us think more structurally about relationships of power in this society and not just to focus on the manifestations that appear to affect, at least initially, people of color.

May 2002

Sports Clubs Make HLS a Smooth Ride
While Harvard Law School launched several new initiatives this year to improve the quality of life on campus, many students still get their kicks the old-fashioned way--by playing games. Perhaps it's not surprising that a law school with its own social club, wine society, newspaper, drama society, and a cappella group would also offer competitive sports. But the opportunities available for players of all skill levels make sports teams at HLS something more than mere after-school activities.

Third-Year Papers Set the Stage
A murder case unravels when the only witness rescinds his identification of the defendant and then winds up shot dead. The prosecutor tries forcing a mistrial to get a second chance at a conviction outraging the defense attorney. The scene makes for good drama, as it should: It's an episode from the television series The Practice, broadcast on ABC in March and written by Peter Blake '95. That script began as his third-year paper at Harvard Law and later helped land Blake a full-time job as a television writer.

The World of Sports and Entertainment Law
If the athletes are making so much money by selling their identity as something that really influences people's behavior, then they cannot really say, "Well, it's unfair to be disciplining us if the kind of behavior we're influencing is very illegal behavior."

March 2002

Brave New Courses
Think student researchers just check citations? Last year, Harvard Law School student research assistants found themselves at a trade panel in Canada and a death penalty conference in Texas. And the results of their work are being heard before congressional committees and the U.S. Supreme Court. In all, some 350 to 400 student research positions are available at HLS each year. These students do an average of 100 hours each as research assistants who work closely with members of the faculty. At any given time, they may be researching topics as diverse as international environmental disputes or the rights of criminal defendants.

Students and Professors Join Forces on Research
In a hushed classroom the discussion focused on threat vectors, tactical nuclear weapons, and the use of T-34 tanks. A white-haired general paced in front of eager students who asked about the secrets of Delta Force and the value of international coalitions. While it may sound like a West Point tutorial or a lecture at Annapolis, this exchange took place in the Austin North classroom at Harvard Law School. In the wake of September 11, HLS has added new courses to train tomorrow's legal stars, and leaders in all fields, in critical issues related to terrorism, Islamic law, and international relations.

Opening Act
Assistant Professor Samuel Bagenstos '93 argued a disabilities rights case before the U.S. Supreme Court on February 27 and answered questions from what he terms "a very active bench." When he returned to campus the next day, students and colleagues had their own questions for him. How did he prepare? What were the hard moments? And how did it feel to read in a Slate magazine article that he bore a striking resemblance to Doogie Howser and looked all of 19?

A Discussion with Elizabeth Warren
Too many people got caught up in the idea that the business must be successful, surely if it were fictitious, one of the other watchers would have caught it. Enron is the Emperor's New Clothes story told again, 21st century style. One big fallout from Enron is that now the watchers will be back on duty and will start watching other companies. I'm not sure we've seen the end of Enron-style collapses. How many other emperors are out there in their undies?

November 2001

The Next Generation
There was a time when the names of the Harvard Law School faculty were synonymous with the titans of American jurisprudence: Brandeis, Frankfurter, Holmes, Story. And today's faculty superstars--names like Dershowitz, Fried, Giunier, Tribe, and many others--are no less remarkable, serving both as master teachers and high-profile practitioners. Keeping this tradition alive is no easy task. The faculty appointment process at HLS consists of three separate committees, which examine candidates from a wide range of legal disciplines and professional backgrounds. Currently eight assistant professors are on the HLS tenure track. While their names are not yet emblazoned in the American consciousness or chiseled into the walls of Langdell Hall, they represent the next generation of a tradition that has often charted the course of legal history.