Recent Highlights

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  Students travel to Washington to present plan to close Guantanamo

  In a replica of a high-level White House negotiation session, teams of students in a new advanced negotiation workshop at Harvard Law School offered advice on how to handle Guantanamo detainees. Although the negotiation wasn’t real, for the students the stakes were still high: One team was later selected by fellow students to travel to Washington, D.C., to make a presentation on Guantanamo to U.S. Assistant Attorney General Ronald Weich.

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  Bridging theory and practice in corporate law

  For the last several years, former Harvard Law School Dean Robert C. Clark ’72 has broken with tradition in teaching his mergers and acquisitions course. It isn’t enough to read leading cases, he realized; students still may leave the classroom without any real understanding of how to structure a deal, identify and avoid pitfalls, and recognize why personalities matter—in short, how M&As work in the real world. So Clark decided to bridge the storied gap between the academy and the world of practice, an approach unheard of in corporate law classes 10 years ago.

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  A new building for teaching, learning and serving communities

  Because legal education demands constant and rigorous discussion and exchange, because legal imagination springs from bridging theory and practice, and because Harvard Law School recruits and develops superb students from all over the world to pursue lives of leadership, the School commissioned—and will soon open—a new space designed precisely for these purposes.

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  From Courtroom to Classroom: Nancy Gertner Reflects (video)

  Brilliant trial attorney, unabashed feminist, passionate advocate for civil rights, and one of Boston’s most respected—and controversial—federal judges, U.S. District Court Judge Nancy Gertner joins the HLS faculty this month as a Professor of Practice after retiring from 17 years on the bench. As renowned for her outspokenness as for her carefully considered decisions—explained in lengthy written opinions—Gertner will offer students an insider’s view of the criminal justice system, the challenges judges face today in a 24/7 news cycle, and more.

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  Professors Smith and Goldberg reinvigorate the study of Private Law at HLS

  HLS Professors John Goldberg and Henry Smith are working to reinvigorate the study of contracts, torts, and property with the new Private Law Workshop, which they co-teach as part of the Project on the Foundations of Private Law at Harvard Law School. The workshop, said Goldberg, is “an opportunity to introduce students to some of the emerging literature that’s aiming to rethink the significance of private law in modern legal systems.”

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  Harvard deans, others probe rising import of overseas study, research and recruitment

  During a Feb. 4 workshop called “Strategic Decision-Making in International Affairs,” sponsored by the Office of the Vice Provost for International Affairs at the Center for Government and International Studies, the deans of Harvard Law School and Harvard Business School laid out some of the challenges facing the University in this era of increasing globalization. They were joined by Jorge Dominguez, the vice provost for international affairs, who offered the University’s viewpoint, David Hunter, dean for academic affairs at the Harvard School of Public Health, and Beth Simmons, director of the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs.

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  Holding Court: Inside the classroom with Shaquille O’Neal

  Since signing with the Boston Celtics in August 2010, Shaquille O’Neal has posed as a statue in Harvard Square, sang the “Cheers” theme song at the Cheers bar in Boston, and conducted the Boston Pops at Symphony Hall. He can now add “helped teach a class at Harvard Law School” to that list.

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  FutureEd 2: A major conference explores how legal education will change amidst rapid globalization (Video)

  Legal education is in a period of profound and much-needed change. That was the unanimous assessment of a group of experts at FutureEd2, a major conference at Harvard Law School that attracted more than 150 legal educators, practitioners, businesspeople and students from around the world.

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  The Olin Advantage

  Lisa Bernstein ’90 knew from her first day of law school that she wanted to be a professor, though as time went on, she wondered whether that would be possible without top grades or law review credentials. What helped to set her apart from other applicants, she says, was the paper she wrote—and mentoring she received—as an Olin Fellow during law school.