Helen R. Kanovsky ’76
Helen R. Kanovsky became the General Counsel of the Mortgage Bankers Association on October 1, 2016. Before that, she spent over seven years as the General Counsel of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (and for a year as the Acting Deputy Secretary). She is the longest serving General Counsel of HUD. As General Counsel, she was the chief law officer of the Department and principal legal adviser to the Secretary and staff of HUD. She was also head of the Departmental Enforcement Center.
Prior to coming to HUD, Ms. Kanovsky served as Chief Operating Officer and, earlier, as the General Counsel of the AFL-CIO Housing Investment Trust. During 1998–99, she was Chief of Staff to Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts.
Previously, Ms. Kanovsky was Executive Vice President and General Counsel of GE Capital Asset Management Corporation (a subsidiary of the General Electric Company) and its predecessor company, Skyline Financial Services Corporation from 1986–1994.
She also worked in private law practice as a partner with Leff & Mason and a partner and associate with Dickstein, Shapiro and Morin. During 1979–1981, she served as a Special Assistant to Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Patricia Roberts Harris. She went with Secretary Harris to the Department of Health, Education and Welfare where she served as Special Assistant to the Secretary and Associate Executive Secretary to the Department which became the Department of Health and Human Services.
She has served as Chair of the National Housing Conference (NHC) and is a member of the Board of the NHC’s research affiliate, the Center for Housing Policy. She also was a Trustee of the National Labor College and a member of the Board of the Special Olympics of the District of Columbia.
Ms. Kanovsky holds an A.B. cum laude in Government from Cornell University where she was Phi Beta Kappa. She received her J.D. cum laude from the Harvard Law School in 1976.
The Honorable Anthony M. Kennedy ’61
Anthony M. Kennedy became an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the U.S. in February 1988 after being nominated by President Reagan. He had previously served on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit since 1975.
He was in private practice in California from 1961–1975. He also was a Professor of Constitutional Law at the McGeorge School of Law, University of the Pacific from 1965 to 1988. He received his B.A. from Stanford University and the London School of Economics, and his LL.B. from Harvard Law School.
He has served in numerous positions during his career, including as a member of the California Army National Guard in 1961, the board of the Federal Judicial Center from 1987–1988, and two committees of the Judicial Conference of the United States: the Advisory Panel on Financial Disclosure Reports and Judicial Activities, subsequently renamed the Advisory Committee on Codes of Conduct, from 1979–1987, and the Committee on Pacific Territories from 1979–1990, which he chaired from 1982–1990.
Randall Kennedy
Randall Kennedy is Michael R. Klein Professor at Harvard Law School where he teaches courses on contracts, criminal law, and the regulation of race relations. He was born in Columbia, South Carolina. For his education he attended St. Albans School, Princeton University, Oxford University, and Yale Law School. He served as a law clerk for Judge J. Skelly Wright of the United States Court of Appeals and for Justice Thurgood Marshall of the United States Supreme Court. He is a member of the bar of the District of Columbia and the Supreme Court of the United States. Awarded the 1998 Robert F. Kennedy Book Award for Race, Crime, and the Law, Mr. Kennedy writes for a wide range of scholarly and general interest publications.
His recent books include: For Discrimination: Race, Affirmative Action, and the Law (2013), The Persistence of the Color Line: Racial Politics and the Obama Presidency (2011), Sellout: The Politics of Racial Betrayal (2008), Interracial Intimacies: Sex, Marriage, Identity, and Adoption (2003), Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word (2002), The Persistence of the Color Line (2011) and For Discrimination: Race, Affirmative Action, and the Law (2013). A member of the American Law Institute, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Association, Mr. Kennedy is also a Charter Trustee of Princeton University.
Jack S. Levin ’61
Jack Levin is a senior partner in the international law firm Kirkland & Ellis LLP (Chicago office). He is also lecturer at both Harvard Law School and the University of Chicago Law School, teaching a course on Structuring Venture Capital, Private Equity, and Entrepreneurial Transactions, which has allowed him to indoctrinate thousands of young minds in the devious art of combining complex business, legal, tax, and accounting concepts. Earlier in his career, Jack served as Assistant to the Solicitor General of the United States under Archibald Cox and Thurgood Marshall.
In 2013 American Lawyer magazine named Jack one of the 50 American lawyers who “over the last 50 years … have had an outsize impact on the [legal] profession,” by helping (in American Lawyer’s words) to “lay the legal groundwork for the then nascent private equity industry.” In 2014 Best Lawyers in America recognized Jack as one of the few attorneys who had been honored continuously in every edition since it began in 1983.
Jack received AJC’s Learned Hand Award (presented by Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg), Chambers’ Global Attorney Lifetime Achievement Award (presented by then U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair’s spouse), and Illinois Venture Capital Association’s lifetime achievement award (presented by then Senator, now President, Barack Obama). He is past president of AJC Chicago and serves on the Illinois Holocaust Museum’s Board of Trustees, and is a Certified Public Accountant.
Jack has authored or co-authored six books dealing with mergers, acquisitions, and private equity transactions, (which he updates and republishes at least annually.)
He graduated summa cum laude, first in his class of 500 from Harvard Law School in 1961, while serving as an editor with the Harvard Law Review. Jack also graduated summa cum laude from the Northwestern University School of Business.
Martha Minow
Martha Minow is the Morgan and Helen Chu Dean and Professor of Law at Harvard Law School where she has taught since 1981. An expert in human rights with a focus on members of racial and religious minorities and women, children, and persons with disabilities, her scholarship also has addressed private military contractors, management of mass torts, transitional justice, and law, culture, and social change. She has published over 150 articles and her books include, In Brown’s Wake: Legacies of America’s Educational Landmark (2010); Partners, Not Rivals: Privatization and the Public Good (2002); and Between Vengeance and Forgiveness: Facing History After Genocide and Mass Violence (1998); she is co-editor of law school casebooks on civil procedure, and on gender and the law. She has delivered more than 75 named or endowed lectures and keynote addresses.
Following nomination by President Obama and confirmation by the Senate, she serves as vice-chair of the board of the Legal Services Corporation. She previously chaired the Board of Directors for the Revson Foundation (New York) and now serves on the board of the MacArthur Foundation, and other non-profit organizations. She is a former member of the board of the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law, the Covenant Foundation, the Iranian Human Rights Documentation Center, and former chair of the Scholar’s Board of Facing History and Ourselves.
A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of the University of Michigan and the Harvard Graduate School of Education, Minow received her law degree at Yale Law School before serving as a law clerk to Judge David Bazelon and Justice Thurgood Marshall. A member of the Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society, her awards include the Sacks-Freund Teaching Award; the Holocaust Center Award; the Radcliffe Graduate Society Medal; Trinity College History Society Gold Medal; and eight honorary doctorates.
Naz K. Modirzadeh ’02
Naz K. Modirzadeh is the founding Director of the Harvard Law School Program on International Law and Armed Conflict (PILAC). In May 2016, she was appointed as a Professor of Practice at Harvard Law School, having previously joined the HLS faculty as a Lecturer on Law in Fall 2014. For the Fall 2016 term, she is teaching International Humanitarian Law/Laws of War, and in the Spring 2017 term she will teach Public International Law as well as International Law, Policy and Decision-Making in War: Advanced Seminar. At PILAC, Modirzadeh is responsible for overall direction of the Program, collaboration with the Faculty Director and other affiliated faculty, development of research initiatives, and engagement with key decision-makers in the armed forces, humanitarian organizations, government, and intergovernmental organizations.
Modirzadeh regularly advises and briefs international humanitarian organizations, UN agencies, and governments on issues related to international humanitarian law, human rights, and counterterrorism regulations relating to humanitarian assistance. For more than a decade, she has carried out legal research and policy work concerning a number of armed conflict situations. Her scholarship and research focus on intersections between the fields of international humanitarian law, international human rights law, and Islamic law. She frequently contributes to academic and professional initiatives in the areas of humanitarian action, counterterrorism, and the laws of war.
In addition to taking part in several expert advisory groups for UN research initiatives, Modirzadeh is a non-resident Research Fellow at the Stockton Center for the Study of International Law at the Naval War College and a non-resident Research Associate in the Humanitarian Policy Group of the Overseas Development Institute. She is also on the Board of Directors of the Center for Civilians in Conflict, on the Advisory Board of Geneva Call, and on the Interim Advisory Group of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs Integrated Regional Information Networks. She received her undergraduate degree from the University of California, Berkeley and her J.D. from Harvard Law School.
Daniel Nagin
Daniel Nagin is Clinical Professor of Law, Vice Dean for Experiential and Clinical Education, and Faculty Director of the WilmerHale Legal Services Center, a community-based public interest law firm home to five Law School civil practice clinics. He is also Faculty Director of the Legal Service Center’s Veterans Legal Clinic, which he founded in 2012. His teaching and research interests focus on clinical education, social welfare law and policy, veterans law, and delivery of legal services.
He is a frequent CLE and conference presenter on veterans law topics. His recent scholarship includes Goals v. Deadlines: Notes on the VA Disability Claims Backlog, 10 UMass Law Review 50 (2015) (symposium issue) and The Credibility Trap: Notes on a VA Evidentiary Standard, 45 Memphis Law Review. 887 (2015) (symposium issue). The Veterans Legal Clinic has won a number of important victories on behalf of disabled veterans, including Ausmer v. Shinseki, 26 Vet. App. 392 (2013) and Froio v. McDonald, 27 Vet. App. 352 (2015).
Nagin’s current public service activities include serving as Co-Chair of the Active Duty Military, Family Members & Veterans Committee of the Boston Bar Association; as a member of the Massachusetts VA Community Engagement Board; as Vice Chair of the Military and Health Law Advisory Board of the ABA Health Law Section; and on the Executive Committee of the Section on Poverty Law of the American Association of Law Schools.
Previously, Nagin was on the faculty of the University of Virginia School of Law, where he founded and directed a public benefits clinic and taught anti-poverty law courses. Nagin has also taught in the clinical program at Washington University School of Law in St. Louis, directed a social service and legal advocacy program for homeless New Yorkers living with HIV/AIDS, and worked as a staff attorney in the Queens office of Legal Services NYC.
Among his recognitions, Nagin has received the John G. Brooks Legal Services Award from the Boston Bar Association, the Goldberg v. Kelly Lives Award from the Virginia Statewide Legal Aid Conference, and the Access to Equal Justice Award from the Washington University School of Law in St. Louis.
Nagin holds a B.A. in History and Government, Phi Beta Kappa and with distinction in all subjects, from Cornell University, an M.A. in Education from Stanford University, and a J.D. with honors from the University of Chicago Law School, where he received the Edwin F. Mandel Award for excellence as a clinical law student.
Bernard W. Nussbaum ’61
Bernard W. Nussbaum is of counsel at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz which he joined in 1966, one year after the firm was formed. He focuses on corporate and securities litigation. Mr. Nussbaum has been active in both the public and private sectors throughout his legal career. In 1993 and 1994, during the Clinton Administration, he was counsel to the President of the United States. In 1974, he was a senior member of the staff of the House Judiciary Committee, which conducted the 1974 Watergate Impeachment Inquiry. His first position in the public sector was as an assistant United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, an office he joined after completing law school.
Mr. Nussbaum graduated from Columbia College in 1958, where he was a member of Phi Beta Kappa. In 1961 he graduated from Harvard Law School. While at HLS, he served as notes editor of The Harvard Law Review, and, upon graduation, was awarded a Harvard University Sheldon Traveling Fellowship. In 1993, Mr. Nussbaum was awarded an honorary LL.D. from the George Washington University National Law Center. He has also served on a number of philanthropic boards and has been a lecturer at Columbia University Law School.
Crystal Nwaneri ’17
Crystal Nwaneri is a third-year law student who graduated from Stanford University with a degree in Communication and a minor in Science, Technology, and Society. Before coming to law school, Ms. Nwaneri worked as a digital communications associate in the Vice Provost Office of Undergraduate Education at Stanford. Besides being a student practitioner at the Cyberlaw Clinic last semester and an editor for the Journal of Law and Technology, Ms. Nwaneri is also a member of the Black Law Student Association and Women’s Law Association. She also served as a research assistant for the Student Privacy Initiative at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society where she is currently a Berkman Klein Fellow.
In early 2016, Ms. Nwaneri was awarded a Cravath Fellowship that allowed her to do legal research on internet retransmissions of broadcast television in Singapore. She has spent the past two summers at the law firm of Fenwick & West, LLP where she will be returning in fall 2017.
The Honorable Patti B. Saris ’76
Patti B. Saris holds the position of Chief Judge of the United Stated District Court in the District of Massachusetts and Chair of the United States Sentencing Commission, Washington, D.C. As Chair of the Commission, she works on criminal justice issues, including sentencing guidelines and prison overincarceration. Previously, Judge Saris sat on the Superior Court of Massachusetts and served as a US Magistrate Judge.
After clerking on the Supreme Judicial Court, she began her career at Foley, Hoag & Elliot. She worked for Senator Kennedy on the Judiciary Committee, and for William Weld in the United States Attorney’s office as Chief of the Civil Division. She was President of the Harvard Board of Overseers, and served on the Visiting Committee to Harvard Law School.
John F. Savarese ’81
John F. Savarese has been a partner in the litigation department of Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz for over 25 years, and is regularly recognized as one of the world’s top litigators, including being selected in International Who’s Who of Business Lawyers, Chambers USA Guide and Lawdragon’s 500 Leading Lawyers in America. He has represented numerous Fortune 500 corporations, global financial institutions and senior executives in SEC and other regulatory enforcement proceedings, as well as white-collar criminal investigations, complex securities litigations and internal investigations
Mr. Savarese worked in the United States Attorneys’ Office for the Southern District of New York, where he tried numerous jury trials, received the Attorney General’s John Marshall Award for Outstanding Legal Achievement, and also served as Chief Appellate Attorney.
Mr. Savarese teaches a course on white-collar criminal law and procedure at Harvard Law School, serves on the executive committee of the New York City Bar Association, is a member of the American Law Institute and serves as adviser to the ALI’s project on principles of law, compliance, enforcement, and risk management. Mr Savarese also is chairman of the board of trustees of the Vera Institute of Justice in New York, a member of the Dean’s Advisory Board at Harvard Law School, a member of the board of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, and the former president of the board of trustees of the Brearley School in New York. Mr. Savarese graduated from Harvard University in 1977 and received his J.D. from Harvard Law School in 1981, where he was an editor of the Harvard Law Review.
Joseph William Singer ’81
Professor Joseph William Singer has been teaching at Harvard Law School since 1992. He was appointed Bussey Professor of Law in 2006. He began teaching at Boston University School of Law in 1984. Singer received a B.A. from Williams College in 1976, an A.M. in political science from Harvard in 1978, and a J.D. from Harvard Law School in 1981. He clerked for Justice Morris Pashman on the Supreme Court of New Jersey from 1981 to 1982 and was an associate at the law firm of Palmer & Dodge in Boston, focusing on municipal law, from 1982 to 1984. He teaches and writes about property law, conflict of laws, and federal Indian law.
He also writes about legal theory with an emphasis on moral and political philosophy. He has published more than 70 law review articles. He is one of the executive editors of the 2012 edition of Cohen’s Handbook of Federal Indian Law (with 2015 Supplement). He has written a casebook and a treatise on property law, as well as No Freedom Without Regulation: The Hidden Lesson of the Subprime Crisis (2015), Entitlement: The Paradoxes of Property (2000), and The Edges of the Field: Lessons on the Obligations of Ownership (2000).
The Honorable David H. Souter ’66
David H. Souter served as an Associate Justice of Supreme Court of the U.S. from 1990–2009. His appointment to the Court was preceded by, among others, service as Attorney General of NH, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of NH, and (briefly) to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit.
Carol S. Steiker ’86
Carol Steiker is the Henry J. Friendly Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and Faculty CoDirector of Harvard’s Criminal Justice Policy Program. She specializes in the broad field of criminal justice, where her work ranges from substantive criminal law to criminal procedure to institutional design, with a special focus on issues related to capital punishment. Recent publications address topics such as the relationship of criminal justice scholarship to law reform, the role of mercy in the institutions of criminal justice, and the likelihood of nationwide abolition of capital punishment. Her most recent book, Courting Death: The Supreme Court and Capital Punishment, coauthored with her brother Jordan Steiker of the University of Texas School of Law, will be published by Harvard University Press in November, 2016.
Professor Steiker is a graduate of Harvard Law School, where she served as president of the Harvard Law Review, the second woman to hold that position in its then 99-year history. After clerking for Judge J. Skelly Wright of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals and Justice Thurgood Marshall of the U.S. Supreme Court, she worked as a staff attorney for the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia, where she represented indigent defendants at all stages of the criminal process. In addition to her scholarly work, Professor Steiker has worked on pro bono litigation projects on behalf of indigent criminal defendants, including death penalty cases in the U.S. Supreme Court. She also has served as a consultant and expert witness on issues of criminal justice for non-profit organizations and has testified before Congress and state legislatures.
Jordan Steiker ’88
Jordan Steiker is the Judge Robert M. Parker Chair in Law and Director of the Capital Punishment Center at the University of Texas School of Law. He served as a law clerk for Honorable Louis Pollak, U.S. District Court (Eastern District of Pennsylvania) and Justice Thurgood Marshall of the United States Supreme Court. He has taught constitutional law, criminal law, and death penalty law at the University of Texas since 1990. His work focuses primarily on the administration of capital punishment in the United States, and he has written extensively on constitutional law, federal habeas corpus, and the death penalty. Professor Steiker has testified before state legislative committees addressing death penalty issues in Texas, including state habeas reform, clemency procedures, sentencing options in capital cases, and the availability of the death penalty for juveniles and persons with intellectual disabilities.
He co-authored the report (with Carol Steiker) that led the American Law Institute to withdraw the death penalty provision from the Model Penal Code. Professor Steiker has also litigated extensively on behalf of indigent death-sentenced inmates in state and federal court, including in the U.S. Supreme Court.
Kristen A. Stilt
Kristen A. Stilt is Professor of Law and Faculty Director of the Animal Law & Policy Program and Director of the Islamic Legal Studies Program: Law and Social Change. She also is an Affiliate Professor in the Department of History at Harvard University.
Stilt’s research focuses on Islamic law and society in both historical and contemporary contexts. She was named a Carnegie Scholar for her work on constitutional Islam, and in 2013 was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship. She has also received awards from Fulbright and Fulbright-Hays. Stilt received her J.D. from The University of Texas School of Law and a Ph.D. in History and Middle Eastern Studies from Harvard University.
Prior to coming to HLS, Stilt was Harry R. Horrow Professor in International Law at Northwestern Law School and Professor of History at Northwestern University. Her publications include Islamic Law in Action (Oxford, 2011) and Contextualizing Constitutional Islam: The Malaysian Experience, in the International Journal of Constitutional Law (2014).
Kathleen M. Sullivan ’81
Kathleen M. Sullivan is partner and chair of the national appellate practice at Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan, LLP, the first woman name partner at any American Lawyer 100 law firm. Now based in Quinn Emanuel’s New York office, Ms. Sullivan argues a wide range of cases in the US Supreme Court and the federal and state appellate courts. She is well-known as one of the nation’s top appellate litigators, and has been named by the National Law Journal one of The 100 Most Influential Lawyers in America.
Before joining the firm, Ms. Sullivan had a prominent academic career in which she taught a generation of Harvard and Stanford students constitutional law. A member of the Harvard Law School faculty from 1984 to 1993, she became Professor of Law in 1989 and won the inaugural Sacks-Freund award for teaching excellence in 1992. After moving to Stanford Law School in 1993, she served as the Stanley Morrison Professor of Law and then, from 1999 to 2004, as the eleventh Dean of Stanford Law School, the first woman dean of any school at Stanford. As Dean, she made fifteen faculty appointments, established a clinical faculty, led the renovation of the classrooms and library, started an international LL.M. program, created academic centers on law and technology and corporate governance, and raised over $100 million for the school.
Ms. Sullivan holds a B.A. from Cornell University, where she was a Telluride Scholar and a College Scholar, an M.A. from Oxford University, which she attended as a Marshall Scholar, and a J.D. from Harvard Law School, where she was a member of the winning team in the Ames Moot Court competition and was named Best Oralist in the final round. She is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. She has returned to Harvard Law School often, including as a Holmes Lecturer, a Tanner Lecturer and a member of the HLS Visiting Committee.
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