New and noteworthy books, publications, research and honors
After signing a government funding bill that provides $1.375 billion for a barrier with Mexico, President Donald Trump announced a national emergency on Friday, Feb. 15, that would allow him to draw $8 billion from the just-passed bill and other existing federal accounts to build the wall. Does the President have the legal authority to […]
After signing a government funding bill that provides $1.375 billion for a barrier with Mexico, President Donald Trump announced a national emergency on Friday, Feb. 15, that would allow him to draw $8 billion from the just-passed bill and other existing federal accounts to build the wall.
Europe’s crisis—the challenges to liberal democracy across the continent, the rise of right-wing nationalist parties, the backlash against the European Union—isn’t a rebellion of economic have-nots, according to former HLS professor Joseph Weiler, who delivered the Herbert W. Vaughan Memorial Lecture, “The European Culture War 2003-2019,” on Feb. 6.
With the increased use of a massive volume and variety of data in our lives, our health care will inevitably be affected, note the editors of a new collection, one of the recent faculty books captured in this section.
Five new lawyer-scholars at Harvard Law School are already influencing the national conversation on our criminal law system.
As staff attorney with the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia for more than three years, Assistant Professor Andrew Manuel Crespo ’08 represented adults and juveniles charged with felonies ranging from armed robberies to homicides. Passionate about the work, he had no plans to become an academic. But early in his career, then-Dean Martha Minow engaged him in a life-changing conversation.
Assistant Professor Crystal Yang ’13, who joined the HLS faculty in 2014, brings an empirical focus to the study of criminal law. Yang, who holds a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard, has in the past focused her empirical studies on criminal sentencing. She has now turned her attention to the extensive use of cash bail and pretrial detention in the U.S., in order to understand their short- and long-term consequences.
“I think criminal procedure is a very fundamental part of the constitutional law of democracy,” says Assistant Professor Daphna Renan, who writes about structural constitutional law, administrative law, and the Fourth Amendment. “When can the government use force against its own citizens? When can it search individuals, communities and communications? How do emergent technologies challenge existing legal frameworks? For anyone who cares about power and how law constrains and enables it, there are no more pressing questions than these.”
There are more than 2 million people imprisoned in the U.S. today. One hundred years from now, historians are likely to be fascinated by this carceral state: How did we get here? Are there better options for society? Some of the answers—or, at least, possible alternatives—may lie in an examination of medieval England. As a Harvard undergrad, Assistant Professor Elizabeth Papp Kamali ’07 fell in love with medieval legal history. After graduating from HLS, she got her Ph.D. in history at the University of Michigan, then joined the HLS faculty in 2015.
Assistant Professor Anna Lvovsky ’13, who joined the HLS faculty in 2017, always planned to teach. A legal historian – she holds a Ph.D. from Harvard – with a focus on the administration of criminal justice, she teaches a seminar on the history of policing in the U.S. as well as courses on evidence and criminal law that invite students to focus on the systemic effects of seemingly neutral legal rules.
