Toby’s blog

I just got the following from the Office of Clinical and Pro Bono Programs:

We are excited to announce a new clinical program which is part of our expanded offerings in Government Lawyering:

Government Lawyering – Policy and Practice: Semester in Washington, DC
Spring 2009

This will be the first time students can work off campus for a full semester in a variety of settings – in the House and in the Senate, at the Justice Department, the Federal Election Commission, the EPA and other federal government offices

The accompanying course will be taught in DC by Jim Flug, ’63 (along with an advisory board of  HLS professors David Barron, Elizabeth Warren, Alex Whiting, Phil Heymann and John Manning)

Students will receive 4 classroom credits; 5 clinical credits and 1 required writing credit, for which they will need an HLS faculty sponsor. Admission to this course and clinic are by permission.  Applications are due October 1, 2008.  The program is limited to 12 students (2L’s and 3L’s only). Students are responsible to find their own housing; Clinical Programs will cover one round trip to and from Cambridge

Interested in Sports and Entertainment Law? Care to find out how to pursue it? Clinical Professor Peter Carfagna is your man. In addition to his post here at HLS, he counsels clients in the areas of litigation, government relations, and complex business transactions. He also served as General Counsel of IMG for over ten years. This spring, he’s teaching Sports and Law: Representing the Professional Athlete. We caught up with Professor Carfagna recently to get learn more about the Sports Law Clinic.

What is the Sports Law Clinic here at HLS?

The Sports Law Clinic at HLS selects students who have taken either the beginning or intermediate Sports Law courses I offer and places them into “real life” sport law settings where they can experience the day-to-day challenges that sports lawyers face. In particular, this year’s placements included the following: The Boston Celtics and the Boston Red Sox; the Cleveland Browns and the Chicago Bears; the Skadden Arps and Shearman & Sterling law firms where sports lawyers at those firms supervise the externs’ assignments; the IMG Legal Department, which I used to supervise for 10+ years as Chief Legal Officer; the Seattle Mariners Legal Department; the Major League Baseball New York headquarters Legal Department; and other placements in sports law firms and legal departments.

The goal of the externship placement is to allow the HLS student to springboard from his/her Sports Law classes at HLS into a real life experience where his/her knowledge of sports law will make the student an immediate asset to the practitioners whose projects I also supervise while acting as a Visiting Lecturer at HLS.

What kinds of work are students responsible for and what projects have you done?

The project primarily includes contract drafting, legal research and memoranda writing; interaction with the supervising attorney and his clients, as well as assistance in handling episodic legal issues that arise in the areas of contract law, intellectual property law, antitrust law, and general corporate/commercial negotiations and pre-litigation settings.

You often hear how difficult it is for students interested in Sports and Entertainment Law to break through into the industry. How true is this and what advice would you give to any student facing this challenge?

The best way to break into the sports law industry is to be placed as an HLS clinical extern/intern! Seriously, the best way to earn a permanent position is to work for a sports law department or a law firm that practices sports law, and to do an outstanding job. Hopefully, after the intern satisfies his supervisors that he can be a “value add” to the sports law work that is already being done by the Legal Department for the law firm, a permanent offer will be made – if not upon graduation, then perhaps later on in the student intern’s legal career.

What do you think is the most unique aspect of the Sports Law Clinic and why?

The most unique aspect is that success in a Sports Law clinical experience requires a combination of background knowledge in a variety of legal disciplines. As described above, it includes the ability to prepare first drafts of various types of sponsorship and customer-related contracts and other legal documents. In particular, the precision required for contract drafting in the sports law area is emphasized at HLS for this very reason, so that the students can “hit the ground running” when asked to prepare a first-draft of a sponsorship agreement, for example, at the beginning of the student’s internship experience.

(L-R) María Luisa Romero 3L, Tim Mayhle 3L, Professor James Cavallaro

María Luisa Romero: (19:09)

As her tenure at HLS begins to wind down, 3L María Luisa Romero stopped in to chat with staffer Julia Foresman about her human rights advocacy in Panamanian prisons. In the fall of her 2L year, as a student in Clinical Professor James Cavallaro’s Human Rights Advocacy seminar, María Luisa already had a project on Panama’s prisons in mind. She’d found there had been few international reports on the topic since Noriega’s ouster. During an independent clinical, met with prison system officials and members of the government, including the attorney general.

Last March, Cavallaro, Romero and two other students visited six prisons. María Luisa estimates these facilities hold more than 70 percent of Panama’s prisoners. During her research, she found, among many other abuses, flagrant corruption, overcrowding, and sanitation problems.

In Fall of 2007, María Luisa returned to Panama with Cavallaro returned to meet with other officials from the correctional system. The culmination of her efforts, which included the submission of a report to the U.N. Human Rights Committee, came a few weeks ago during a hearing before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.

To watch the recording of the hearing on March 7, 2008 before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, visit their website. The title of the hearing is “Human Rights Violations in Prisons in Panama.” Please note that the hearing is in Spanish.

I noticed this give and take on recent Supreme Court cases on Slate and since two of the four participants are members of the HLS faculty, I thought you might be interested. Professor Jack Goldsmith is an expert on national security law and teaches constitutional law and other courses. Visiting Professor Walter Dellinger leads one of our Supreme Court Clinicals.

Visit this link for The Supreme Court Breakfast Table.

An admitted student recently asked me how supportive Harvard is of student initiatives that maybe don’t match up with existing opportunities here. I asked Lisa Dealy, who heads up our office of Clinical and Pro Bono Programs, to respond. She forwarded me her response so I would know what’s happening around here too and said I could post it here if I liked:

“We actually spend a lot of our time with students helping them design and implement clinical and pro bono projects (and sometimes even non clinical/pro bono things) and I like to think we are very supportive of student initiatives. Here are some examples:

“Students wanted to start a Spanish for Public Interest Lawyers course & came to us…we were able to do it quickly (by the next semester) and fairly cheaply by hiring LLM students who are native Spanish speakers; we run it out of the clinical office even though it is a non credit (and non clinical) course. It’s been very successful and now we offer two different levels of the course.

“A few years ago, students approached us about sponsoring trips during fly-out week. We now have established programs during fly out week and spring break and winter intersession—this year about 40 students did pro bono work over spring break and we arranged the placements through various HLS alumni and Lee Branson went as far as arranging housing and group activities for the students. We invited clinical instructors to go and provide extra on-site supervision. So, not only did we respond to the initial student idea, but we’ve continued to refine the idea and make it better each year.

“We also recently assisted a student who was trying to set up a program for local kids coming out of foster care—she was not seeking credit for this, but she wanted replicate a model she had learned about during her independent clinical work last winter. We gave her contacts with people both within HLS and outside of HLS and gave her advice on how to proceed and what she could do within HLS to ensure this program kept going after she had graduated. I met with her several times and last week she was in to report that a Cambridge non-profit had picked up the program and she has 1L students interested in keeping the program going.

“We work really hard to make sure students aren’t duplicating efforts (either within HLS or trying to start an organization that already exists in the community)…but even when we find students trying to reinvent the wheel we don’t turn them away, we talk to them to see if they can do something that hasn’t been done yet!”

Founded in 1998, the Recording Artists Project (RAP) focuses on entertainment law issues. RAP provides legal assistance to music artists, independent record labels, production companies, songwriters, film companies, artist managers and other arts and entertainment entrepreneurs and firms. Recently, the Executive Director of RAP, 2L Jennifer Johnson-Blalock sat down for a Q&A to share some insight.

What is RAP?

The Recording Artists Project (RAP) was founded nearly ten years ago to provide pro bono counsel to Boston-area recording artists. RAP functions as both a clinical through the Legal Services Center and as a student organization, allowing students maximum flexibility with their involvement. Within the organization, students work in teams, with the help of our dedicated supervisor, Brian Price, to solve the legal problems of local musicians. These issues are incredibly varied; RAP works on recording contracts, management and agency agreements, licensing, copyright and trademark issues, business formation–basically whatever the client needs.

How did you get involved and why?

I’ve always been committed to arts and entertainment; in college, I worked in publishing and journalism. I decided to go to law school because I wanted to be more on the business, rather than the creative, side of the industry. So I came to HLS knowing that I wanted to work in entertainment law, and I sought out those organizations that would allow me to get experience. I joined the Committee on Sports and Entertainment Law, the Arts and Literature Law Society, and, of course, the Recording Artists Project.

I served as a team leader during my first year in RAP, working with a fantastic band throughout the year on both a management and an agency contract. This year, I’m the Director of the organization. I’m still involved with clients–last semester, I worked on a cybersquatting case and a studio rental contract, and I’m currently going over a licensing agreement. But as the Director, I also coordinate member and client recruitment. I’ve really enjoyed the opportunity to play a greater role in the organization and help ensure its continued presence at HLS.

How has the organization evolved over time?

When RAP first started, it was a very collaborative organization, frequently working with the Berkman Center and other student groups like the Committee on Sports and Entertainment Law. I think that over the years, RAP has started to focus more exclusively on client work. Though the actual legal work is definitely the heart of the organization, this approach can be somewhat isolating, only giving students the opportunity to interact with their team members. This year, we’re trying to turn RAP into more of a community that helps its members explore our shared interests. We’re holding regular meetings to discuss the different cases we’re working on, which gives the members a much broader view of the range of legal work. We’re also planning on using these meetings to explore the music industry more generally by discussing current developments and bringing in speakers. We want RAP to be a place where students who are interested in entertainment law have the opportunity to interact with like-minded people and really learn from each other.

What are your plans this summer? Did your involvement in RAP
influence this decision?

This summer I’ll be working at Irell & Manella, a law firm in Los Angeles. They’re incredibly strong in the entertainment sector, both in litigation and transactional work, which is what I hope to focus on. RAP has solidified my desire to work in entertainment, and it’s also made it possible. Jobs in this field are extremely competitive, partially because it’s viewed as a glamorous area of the law and partially because a lot of work is done at the boutique level. Everyone I talked to during OCI was very enthusiastic about my work with RAP. I think it gave me a huge boost because it showed that I was dedicated, and it’s also given me practical experience. In terms of both personal fulfillment and professional success, RAP is the best thing I’ve done so far at HLS.

Starting with the incoming Class of 2011 (starting this fall), HLS students can get their 3rd year of law school tuition paid by us in return for a 5-year commitment to public service. The official announcement is here on the home page.

Here are the details on the Student Financial Services website.

It is also being covered in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal Law Blog.

We’re very excited to be the first law school in the country to do this!

Over Winter Term, 2Ls and 3Ls have the option to take one of a variety of interesting classes such as Cyberlaw: Points of Control, taught by intellectual property whiz Jonathan Zittrain. I had the chance a few weeks ago to sit in on Professor Zittrain’s class for an afternoon of student discourse on the defense of Wikis and the blunders of sockpuppetry.

With course themes ranging from new modes of control over intellectual property to the expression of conflicting interests of commercial and individual internet broadcasters, Zittrain encourages his students to think critically about why IP law has developed the way it has, and how changes in technology have pushed the law to change.

The topic of the day I visited included an engaging and humorous discussion of a Wikipedia assignment requiring students to individually update any Wikipedia page. Then, groups of 5-6 students were asked to help resolve one of the many ongoing disputes on the site through Wikipedia’s semi-formal dispute resolution procedure. The mixed reactions to the group who chose the contentious subject of “waterboarding,” for instance, threw the world of Wikipedian editors into a dither as they scrambled to react to Zittrain’s innovative teaching methods that include requiring students to take risks and, as they did in the Wikipedia assignment, potentially step over the line of cyberlaw norms. Yet, as one message boarder quipped, “Wait… a group of Harvard Law students want to edit Wikipedia and this is a bad thing?”

The bold energy and expertise with which Zittrain approaches this course is palpable in the reaction of his students. “This class ties copyright, defamation, privacy, and other legal concepts to the real world in a way that no other class that I have experienced here does,” said 2L Arjun Mehra. “It also helps that [Zittrain], a co-founder of the Berkman Center, is on the cutting edge of this dynamic legal field.” Nika Engberg, also a 2L and a line editor for JOLT, agreed and said that she feels this course is great preparation for further IP class work. “For example, the issue of whether and how to grant IP rights to software developers comes up in both copyright and patent contexts (as well as trade secret contexts), and I believe that this class is giving me a stronger background in these kinds of issues.”

On the heels on my class visit, Admissions staffer Julia Foresman sat down with Elizabeth Stark, a recent graduate, Berkman Center fellow, and Cyberlaw teaching assistant to further discuss the course and new laws governing the Cyberlaw community.

Elizabeth Stark: (13:40)

Professor Bob Bordone recently returned to speak with us about the Harvard Negotiation and Mediation Clinical Program, of which is Director.

The Harvard Negotiation and Mediation Clinical Program (HNMCP) provides HLS students with practical, real-world experience in the fields of negotiation, dispute resolution, and conflict management, with a particular focus on conflict mapping and dispute systems design. Students in the program are paired with outside organizations, institutions, or individuals who provide projects related to negotiation, dispute resolution, or conflict management.

Bob Bordone: 8:29

If you weren’t convinced that opportunities for students at HLS were boundless, 3L Therese Rohrbeck’s winter term project erases much doubt. In a brief interview with staffer Julia Foresman a few weeks ago, Therese discussed her project studying the traffic of cultural property and researching the looting of colonial art at U.S. ports of entry. “Having been an art history major in college, cultural property protection is a passion of mine,” she said.

During winter term, Therese will travel first to Chicago where she will serve as a volunteer for the annual Archaeological Institute of America and the American Philological Association meeting, and then she will be in Guatemala City for the remainder of the term researching and conducting interviews with local officials.

Therese Rohrbeck: (8:41)

We hope to track Therese’s story, as well as that of other students abroad for winter term, through January… so check back!