HLS in Focus

I always find my professors a little intimidating the first couple of weeks of class before I get to know them a little better. I’m especially afraid of them when they use the Socratic method…but this semester I got a head start. My secured transactions professor offered to take us out to lunch in small groups and put out a sign up sheet the very first class. A couple of friends and I decided to take him up on his offer and went out with him last Wednesday after class. The day that we were scheduled to go out to lunch with him, our Professor started class by saying how disappointed he was in us as a group. I thought he was going to say something about us not understanding the material or something but instead he said that no one had signed up for lunch with him for the rest of the semester. I felt relieved and glad that he really wanted us to sign up for lunch with him. Professor Kaufmann insisted that we had to pick the restaurant so of course we went with Thai food, our favorite. We walked to 9 Tastes in Harvard Square.

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Today we announced the creation of our new Public Service Venture Fund. Through the new fund, the Law School will distribute $1 million or more annually in grants to graduating HLS students seeking to launch public service careers.

The first program of its kind at any law school, the fund will be used to offer “seed money” for start-ups of new non-profit ventures, full salary grants to support students who want to work at nonprofits or government agencies that have limited ability to hire or who want to create new projects at existing organizations, and salary supplements for graduating students who have been hired with partial salaries by nonprofits and government agencies in the U.S. and abroad. Students applying for the grants will propose how they will put the money to use after graduating, and the school will assist students in pursuing grants from this fund and other sources.

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CAMBRIDGE, MA (Tuesday, February 9, 2010) – Harvard Law School today announced the creation of the Public Service Venture Fund, which will start by awarding $1 million in grants every year to help graduating students pursue careers in public service.

The first program of its kind at a law school, the fund will offer “seed money” for start-up non-profit ventures and salary support to students who hope to pursue post-graduate work at nonprofits or government agencies in the United States and abroad.

“This new fund is inspired by our students’ passion for justice,” said Harvard Law School Dean Martha Minow. “It’s an investment that will pay dividends not only for our students but also for the countless number of people whose lives they will touch during their public service careers.”

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My friend and I were both working on our laptops a few days ago and he looked up and asked “Is there any reason I should take wine law?” to which I responded “The more important question is: Is there any reason you should NOT take wine law??” He’s now in the class. I know it probably sounds like a blowoff class, but it’s not — there are actually some interesting constitutional issues around selling wine on the Internet that are a bigger deal than you might think. As you can probably tell from conversations like these, we just passed the first week of classes for spring semester, a time of jostling around, finalizing your class schedule, and fanatically checking MyPlan to see if the gods of the waitlists are smiling down upon you. I got in the class I was waitlisted for, but given my current credit load, I’m not sure yet whether that’s a smile or a thunderbolt from up on high.

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Last week was the first week of a new semester here at Harvard. It’s a hectic time, with everyone dashing to the COOP for those final few textbooks, sorting out which friends are in their classes or have their same breaks for meals, taking stock of new professors, and clearing up any last uncertainties in their schedules (sometimes attending more than a full course load as they try to decide what to drop.)

A prevailing question at this time of year — sometimes up in the air until the first class meeting, sometimes well-known and influential on students deciding what to take — is whether a professor allows laptops in class. The most common answer is yes, which I think tends to set expectations and give professors who don’t allow them a bad rap. I met a few incoming students this year who were instantly disgusted with professors who expected them to take notes by hand and bitterly jealous of friends with different ones.

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I am a junk food addict. I think that deep down I am just rebelling against the fact that my mother is a dietitian. After a childhood filled with sliced fruit and whole wheat bread, I love me a good cheeseburger. Since coming to HLS, I have been pleasantly surprised to find that some of the best burgers I’ve ever had are right here in Cambridge. No joke. Here’s a rundown of my three favorite burger joints around campus.

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With so many HLS alumni serving as leaders and government officials in Washington D.C., I guess it was easy for me to think HLS only graduates public servants and civic leaders. In fact, I was pleasantly shocked — my third week of school — when I first learned that Harvard Law School’s corporate law program is one of the finest in the world. I’ve since discovered that HLS is home to many one-of-a kind programs, including the Harvard Negotiation Project, the Program on Corporate Governance, and the Law and Business program of study. Through these programs and the school’s resources, I’ve had the opportunity to learn from renowned practitioners and judges in addition to the outstanding HLS faculty. For example, just this past semester I had the opportunity to take Mergers & Acquisitions with the Vice-Chancellor of the Delaware Court of Chancery — widely regarded as the most important corporate law court in the world.

Enter Leo E. Strine, Jr.– a no-nonsense judge who isn’t afraid to boldly law-down the law yet paradoxically uses humor to illustrate his points and often quotes Southpark’s Eric Cartman (“Class, you know what question to ask first: do they have the authori-tay?”). Rather than teach M&A as a plain series of transactions and lawsuits, Vice-Chancellor Strine illustrated the case history as an epic struggle for control of the corporate world. When referencing terminology in cases like “omnipresent specter” and “corporate bastion,” Vice-Chancellor Strine joked that the Delaware courts play too much Dungeons & Dragons. Other times the Vice-Chancellor kept us on the edge of our seats, like young children listening to a storybook adventure, when he lectured on the infamous “corporate raiders” and hostile takeovers of the 1980’s and the emergence of lá résistance and “takeover defense.” Whether it was Wall Street mergers and buyouts or medieval raiders and pirates, we were hooked.

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One of the great things about being at HLS is that so many of the students and faculty here have great connections. That means that we get all kinds of speakers giving presentations. Today I went to a brown bag lunch sponsored by Harvard Law School Latter-Day Saints Student Association. Suzannah Beasley is a professional genealogist who just happens to be a married to a law student. Suzannah owns her own genealogy company and has written several books on her own family history.

Suzannah walked us through the process of researching her own family history in order to demonstrate all the different sources of information that can be used to conduct one’s own family research. Interestingly, most of the documents that genealogists base their research on are legal. I was surprised to see how many public records are now being digitized. Census reports for example, are now available on sites like ancestry.com, which I also learned is the third most subscribed site out there. According to at least one survey, something like sixty percent of the population is interested in their family history.

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It is perhaps no surprise that over 70 Harvard Law School faculty and alumni — including former Dean Elena Kagan and Professors David Barron, Cass Sunstein, and Jody Freeman — have been playing an integral role in the Obama administration. (See http://www.law.harvard.edu/news/spotligh…) These faculty and alumni are carrying on the HLS public interest tradition and making a difference across the law and policy spectrum.

What may be a surprise, however, is that The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart is a big fan of HLS Professor Elizabeth Warren, who is Chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel on TARP. She recently appeared on his show and…let’s just say that he is enamored of her ideas. You can check it out here: http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/tue-ja….

To celebrate the end of winter term and the 1L class we’ve been teaching, Professor Wilkins invited the teaching team — his assistant, me and the other TA, and the firm partner/practitioner — plus significant others to his beautiful Victorian house for a dinner party. Oh man, if there’s any way to go through law school, it’s going to dinner parties at professors’ houses — they really know what they’re doing. Caviar, Dom Perignon (!!), and. . . conversation about Jersey Shore. I kid you not. It was the partner’s wife (also an attorney) who first broached the subject, but after a few minutes of animated discussion we found out that Professor Wilkins, my husband, and Neema (the other TA) were also talking about Jersey Shore on the other side of the table. I think what tipped off the two groups that we were having the same conversation was the repeated use of the word “Snooki.”

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