Law School Announces New Hires

Harvard Law School (HLS) has hired new professors in the fields of international law and administrative law, the school announced last week.

Jack L. Goldsmith and John F. Manning ’82, both former Department of Justice officials with several years of teaching experience, were appointed to tenured positions last spring. The faculty also voted at that time to promote David Barron ’89, an assistant professor at HLS since 1999, to professor of law.

“I’m thrilled about these appointments because all three of these professors are brilliant scholars and magnificent teachers—people who will enrich the intellectual life of our entire community,” HLS Dean Elena Kagan wrote in an e-mail.

Goldsmith and Manning join the HLS community during a period of great change. The Law School is in the planning stage of a multi-million dollar development project that will upgrade and expand student facilities, increase the number of classrooms and add more faculty offices. Kagan said the school’s strategic plan calls for the hiring of 15 professors over the next 10 years.

“One of the law school’s top priorities right now is expansion of the faculty,” Kagan said in a statement on the HLS website. “Our hiring committees worked diligently in the spring to make sure we found and recruited the best scholarly and teaching talent we could find.”

Goldsmith served as head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel from October 2003 until July 2004. Before his high-profile federal role, Goldsmith was a professor at the University of Chicago Law School and the University of Virginia School of Law.

In the past, Goldsmith has taught Foreign Affairs Law, International Law, Conflicts of Law and Civil Procedure. This year he will be teaching Conflicts of Law and Presidential Power. He is an international law expert with degrees from Yale Law School and Oxford University, and a diploma in private international law from the Hague Academy of International Law.

HLS recruited Manning—an authority on administrative law, statutory interpretation and separation of powers law—from Columbia Law School. As assistant to the U.S. solicitor general from 1991 to 1994, Manning worked on a broad range of cases, including tax, criminal and telecommunications cases as well as a military base closure case.

Manning taught Administrative Law and a seminar, Statutory Interpretation in the Post-New Deal State, while acting as a visiting professor at HLS in fall 2002. He will teach those classes and Federal Courts this year.

“His scholarship on statutory interpretation has proved to have real-world importance, and his teaching is extraordinary,” Kagan said in the statement.

During his senior year at Harvard College, Manning won the Newcomen Prize for Best Senior Thesis in Material History. He said he wrote about the connection between the development of industrial policy in England during the Great Depression and the adoption of tariffs.

“I’m delighted to join the Harvard Law faculty,” Manning said in a telephone interview last week. “It’s an amazingly intellectually stimulating place. The students are phenomenal, the colleagues are wonderful. It’s a fantastic place to work, to do scholarship and teach.”

Barron, whose specialties are local government law and administrative law, is teaching Property and Administrative Law this year. He will also co-teach with Brandeis Professor of Law Gerald E. Frug a seminar titled International Local Government Law.

Kagan called Barron a “tremendous addition to the tenured faculty.” He graduated from Harvard College in 1989 with a degree in history and from HLS in 1994.

“I am thrilled to be a tenured member of the faculty,” Barron said in a statement on the HLS website. “I have loved teaching at HLS these last five years, particularly after having received such a wonderful education here when I was a student. I look forward to continuing to try to do for my own classes what my teachers did for me—convey a sense of just how important, challenging and exciting the study and practice of law can be.”

—Staff writer Andrew C. Esensten can be reached at esenst@fas.harvard.edu.