News
Declining ad revenues and competition for readers online have dramatically altered the media landscape in recent years, and the consequences for Harvard University's graduate school newspapers have been no exception to the general trend. Responding to rising administrative costs, plunging profits, and uninterested readership, Harvard's graduate papers, long plagued by competition with the undergraduate Harvard Crimson and its vast staff of eager would-be journalists not yet jaded by the real world, have joined forces in a single publication. The Harvard Business School's Harbus, the Harvard Law Record, and the Harvard Kennedy School Citizen will henceforth publish together under the banner of Harbus Law Citizen.
News
Alexander Boldizar '99 became recognized by Slovakia's president as the "first Slovak citizen to graduate from Harvard Law School" when, as he puts it, "small country nepotism" got him back the citizenship he'd abandoned in 1989 (he thought it would be unsafe to keep it during a visit to the crumbling Berlin Wall). Since then, he has managed an art gallery in Bali, established a flourishing career in editing and freelance writing, and has continued to seek publication of his magnum opus, The Ugly, a satirical novel about a dispossessed Siberian tribe that sends one of its members, Muzhduk, to learn the ways of lawyers from HLS, a plotline which helps express Boldizar's frustrations with law and legal reasoning.
News
Alfred "Dave" Steiner '98 didn't put aside his interest in art while he was a law student, participating in studios elsewhere at Harvard. Another outlet was the Record, for which Steiner drew "Reasonableman", a comic about a law student who was anything but what his title implied. The generosity of his firm allowed him the time to develop his art, some tamer samples of which can be seen here. Connections in the art world were hard to come by among fellow JDs, so Steiner relied on assistance from alumni of the Design School, eventually landing shows in New York and elsewhere – and a favorable review in The New Yorker. Below, Steiner explains how he found success in art.
News
Widespread public participation and administrative cost-benefit analysis are not always considered to be compatible concepts. But on March 1, when Cass Sunstein '78 spoke on "Humanizing Cost-Benefit Analysis" to a room packed with students, professors, and community members, he demonstrated a commitment to linking these two ideas. Dean Martha Minow introduced Sunstein, Harvard Law School professor and Administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, as the head of "the single most powerful office most people have never heard of." Sunstein spoke broadly about his goals for OIRA and President Barack Obama '91's vision for changes within the agency.
News
Mormons, often misunderstood by popular culture and viewed with some suspicion by many Americans, occupy a strange place in contemporary America. In a culture that often sidesteps the important questions of faith and spirituality, the followers of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, or LDS, often stand out because of the important ways their beliefs differ from the main stream of Christians and the zeal with which they proselytize. Because of the questions lingering on the minds of many outsiders to the religion, the LDS student group at HLS has for the last five years convened an annual lecture entitled "Mormonism 101" in order to educate the community about their beliefs. This year's guest speaker was Elder Dallin H. Oaks, an esteemed member of the LDS Quorum of the Twelve Apostles and a former justice of the Supreme Court of Utah.
News
Writing about a spectacular crime may not seem that far a leap from law school, but getting there required a bit of a detour for Scott Andrew Selby '98. After leaving HLS, which he credits for giving him the research skills he's used as a nonfiction writer, Selby acquired a hybrid degree in human rights and IP law from Sweden's Lund University, where he became interested in blood diamonds. His thesis research took him to Antwerp, Belgium, the world center of the diamond trade, where he first became interested in the heist that's at the center of his book, Flawless: Inside the Largest Diamond Heist in History, co-written with journalist Greg Campbell. The prologue is excerpted below.
Opinion
These kind of delays are pervasive in every one of the U.S.'s 57 immigration courts, and are getting worse by the day, thanks to two factors: the underfunding of the immigration courts, and the explosive funding of law enforcement programs that refer foreign-born people from encounters with the criminal justice system into the immigration court system. While the recent media attention on the immigration system has focused on the possibility of political reform, and importantly, on the shocking conditions and challenges of the immigration detention system, the actual functioning of the immigration courts themselves has received little ink.
Opinion
Less than ten months after the "nation of cowards" flap, Holder triumphantly announced his decision to try alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in Federal Court in Manhattan, steps from the former World Trade Center. Little did Holder know how prescient his February words about America's cowardice would become, as slowly, but steadily, members from all parts of the political spectrum conspired to keep KSM and other 9/11 plotters out of civilian court.
News
Unfortunately for theater goers attending the A.R.T.'s latest production, Clifford Odets does not appear to have taken this wisdom from Milton when writing his own Paradise Lost. The heavy-handedness of his writing flattens characters who are struggling through the challenges of the Great Depression and have no need of metaphor and abstraction. And while the A.R.T. has attempted to bring the drama to life with quasi-existentialism and innovative visual techniques, the story is deprived of true significance by its suffocatingly hollow dialogue.
Opinion
Martin Kramer is using the mantle of Harvard University to promote racism and genocidal birth prevention policies, and Harvard's Weatherhead Center for International Affairs is letting him get away with it. The Weatherhead Center is also striking back at critics, aiming to freeze them out by claiming that asking the Center to condemn Kramer's statements flies in the face of academic debate and freedom of speech.