[The following excerpt is reprinted from Harvard Law Today, January 8, 2025. Please see the Harvard Law Today website (opens in new tab) for the full article, including Professor Bill Alford’s tribute.]
As admirers across the United States and around the globe mourn the passing of former President Jimmy Carter on Dec. 29, 2024 at the age of 100, three current and former Harvard Law professors share their memories of working with him and reflect on his life and legacy.
Retired U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer ’64, now the Byrne Professor of Administrative Law and Process, worked with the Carter administration as an aide to Senator Ted Kennedy before the late president appointed him to serve on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit. William Alford ’77, the Jerome A. and Joan L. Cohen Professor of Law, recalls briefing President Carter about the People’s Republic of China, and recounts how Carter helped free a fellow scholar from imprisonment in Sudan. And in an op-ed published in The New York Times, USAID Administrator Samantha Power ’99 argued that while much attention is paid to his post-presidential work, “Jimmy Carter’s elevation of human rights in U.S. foreign policy offers many urgent lessons for today.”