New and noteworthy books, publications, research and honors
A six-year-long study by Harvard Law School’s Access to Justice Lab (A2J Lab) evaluated and analyzed the effectiveness of pro bono representation in divorce cases in Philadelphia County. The recently released study found that people who received legal representation were 87% more likely to achieve a divorce than people without it.
According to Harvard Law School lecturer Jonathan Lovvorn, saving the planet and its inhabitants from climate catastrophe begins with the world’s most vulnerable population: animals.
When Myanmar’s military junta tightened its grip in the late ’80s to quash a nationwide democracy movement, Yee Htun fled the brutal crackdown on dissent along with her mother, a doctor turned human rights activist, and three siblings. After five years in a refugee camp in Thailand, they immigrated to Canada as government-sponsored refugees, unsure of when they might return home.
J. Mark Ramseyer, Mitsubishi Professor of Japanese Legal Studies at the Harvard Law School, has been conferred the Order of the Rising Sun, Gold Rays with Neck Ribbon, from the Japanese government. One of the oldest and highest national decorations, this award recognizes his extensive contributions to the development of Japanese studies in the U.S.
A new book from researchers at the Berkman Klein Center, with its origins in a 3-year study of the media ecosystem surrounding the 2016 U.S. presidential election, disrupts the traditional narrative—invoking “fake news,” Russian interference, data breaches and social media—around what contributed to the divisive outcome.
At a recent Harvard Law School Library Book Talk, Catharine A. MacKinnon, a pioneer of legal theory and practice and an activist for women’s rights, discussed her latest book “Butterfly Politics,” in which she argues that seemingly minor interventions in the legal realm can have a butterfly effect that generates major social and cultural transformations.
During the introduction to the book launch event for “Big Data, Health Law, and Bioethics,” one of the editors, Harvard Law School Professor I. Glenn Cohen ’03, faculty director of the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics, told a story about how powerful – and perhaps foreboding – big data can be.
On Sept. 17, the Harvard Law School Project on Disability (HPOD) will commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Special Olympics with Timothy Shriver, Special Olympics International Board Chairman.
On Google’s main campus in Mountain View, Calif., Harvard Law School’s Center on the Legal Profession convened more than 80 innovation leaders from around the world—half from law firms and half from in-house legal departments—in June, for a series of in-depth workshops around how their organizations operationalize innovation.
A letter drafted by HLS’s Emmett Environmental Law and Policy Clinic Director Wendy Jacobs, and signed by nearly 100 hospital leaders and Harvard faculty, calls on the Environmental Protection Agency to withdraw its proposed rule on scientific “transparency,” saying that the change would drastically limit the scientific and medical knowledge that underlie a host of EPA regulations that protect human health.
