HLS Hires Three Young Profs

Harvard Law School (HLS) Dean Elena Kagan announced the hiring of three junior faculty members yesterday, according to a statement released by the school.

I. Glenn Cohen, Benjamin Roin, and Benjamin Sachs will join the HLS community as assistant professors in the fall.

“I am thrilled to welcome these talented young scholars to the faculty,” Kagan said in the statement.

Expanding the size of the faculty has been a key priority for Kagan, who has tried to poach tenured professors at other universities like Cass R. Sunstein ’75 and Mark V. Tushnet ’67.

I. GLENN COHEN

Cohen, a specialist in bioethics, was an academic fellow at the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at the Law School this year.

He publishes on topics ranging from pediatric research ethics to end-of-life decision-making to pre-embryo disposition agreements.

After graduating from the Law School in 2003—where he earned the Sears Prize for top grades in his first year—he served as an honors program attorney in the appellate staff of the U.S. Department of Justice, Civil Division between 2004 and 2006.

BENJAMIN ROIN

Roin, a patent law specialist, is also currently an academic fellow at the Petrie-Flom Center for Bioethics. He has published work on subjects at the nexus of patent law and biotechnology, such as the role of the patent process in the development of pharmaceutical goods.

While at the Law School, Roin, too, was awarded the prestigious Sears Prize for the excellence of his first-year grades. After graduating in 2005, he served as a clerk for Judge Michael W. McConnell on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit.

BENJAMIN SACHS

The third member of the group, Sachs, is a labor law scholar who has been the Joseph Goldstein fellow and lecturer at Yale Law Schoool since fall 2005.

Sachs is currently working on several articles about state and local labor law, new labor law regulation, and the “union wage gap.”

In addition to clerking for Judge Stephen R. Reinhardt of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit after receiving his law degree from Yale, he served as a staff attorney at the Workplace Justice Project and assistant general counsel of the Service Employees International Union.