Six out of the seven honored recipients of the H. Thomas Austern Memorial Writing Competition were Harvard Law School graduates, the Food and Drug Law Institute announced last week.

Peter Barton Hutt, senior counsel at Covington & Burling and HLS lecturer on law, teaches the Food and Drug Law course and has assisted in the publication of over 50 papers from HLS students during his time teaching.

“The students in my course regularly produce the best scholarship in the country in the field of food and drug law,” said Hutt. “In fact, all six of the HLS papers will be published in the Food and Drug Law Journal.”

Sponsored by the Food and Drug Law Institute, a nonprofit educational association dedicated to advancing public health, the contest serves to encourage law students to provide research/conduct scholarly research in the areas of foods, drugs, devices, and biologics. Prizes are awarded in two categories – papers fewer than 40 pages and papers between 41 and 100 pages.

Two HLS graduates were awarded the competition’s first place prizes for short and long paper submissions:

John Murphy ’07 – “Mandatory Labeling of Foods Made from Cloned Animals: Grappling with Moral Objections to the Production of Safe Products,” placed first in the short paper category.

Daniel Gorlin ’07 – “Staving off Death: An Assessment of the Pharmaceutical Industry’s Strategies to Protect Blockbuster Franchises upon the Loss of Marketing Exclusivity,” placed first in the long paper category.

Leah Satine ’07 placed second in the long paper competition for her paper, “Is my Yogurt Lying? Developing and Applying a Framework for Determining Whether Wellness Claims on Probiotic Yogurts Mislead.”

Three additional graduates received honorable mention for their work:

Amanda L. Lydon ’07 – “The FDA’s Decision to Make Emergency Contraception Available without a Prescription: Guaranteed Access for Women or Just the First Step?” (short paper submission)

Brianna MacDonald ’07 – “Perspectives on FDA’s Regulation of Nanotechnology: Emerging Challenges and Potential Solutions” (long paper submission)

Evan D. Diamond ’07 – “Reversible – FOIA Limitations on Agency Actions to Disclose Human Gene Therapy Clinical Trial Data” (long paper submission)

The contest is in memory of H. Thomas Austern ’29, an expert in food and drug law and a longtime partner at Covington & Burling.