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Rosabeth Moss Kanter
Ernest L. Arbuckle Professor at Harvard Business School; Founding Chair and Founding Director of the Harvard University Advanced Leadership Initiative

Millions of Cheers for William P. Alford

I’ve known Bill Alford casually for many years, perhaps stemming from the long-ago time that I was a Fellow in Law and Social Science at Harvard Law School. But I’ve really gotten to know Bill Alford in depth more recently, thanks to his enormous generosity in joining the faculty board of the Harvard Advanced Leadership Initiative. On top of all the other things on his plate from his multiple roles at HLS, there he was saying Yes to more: teaching ALI Fellows about China, offering wise counsel to me and the other faculty leaders, and also becoming my dinner buddy for Chinese and other cuisine along with a mutual friend. He gave me a very special chance to contribute to his important work for Special Olympics, for which he not only offered board leadership but also befriended, mentored, and cheered for many of the SO athletes. And then there’s our shared love of our esteemed colleague and friend Charles Ogletree and shared sadness at his illness. In fact, another sign of Bill’s generosity is that he made time for all these personal gestures of friendship.

I can’t stop at three cheers for Bill, because there are so many dimensions to his impact on people and issues. He has touched millions of lives through his work for international students, his work on disability law, and his belief in the law as an instrument for perfecting the world. He is highly intellectual and knowledgeable and also intensely human–the essence of humanity in a world that needs more of it. He has touched me and countless others with his kindness, gentleness, humility, and caring.

Steve Moore

Harvard College ’01, Professional Hockey Player

I’ve had the pleasure of knowing Bill Alford for over 20 years now and have watched with respect and admiration his prolific tenure as Vice Dean for the Graduate Program and International Legal Studies at Harvard Law School. Over that time, I have been fortunate to see first-hand the many remarkable personal qualities that Bill possesses, and the impact he has had on those fortunate enough to be around him. His intelligence is evident in the quality of his scholarship and the many awards he has received for his significant academic contributions. His open mindedness has led to a transformation of HLS’s international programs. His inclusiveness has been the impetus behind HLS welcoming more international students to attend Harvard than any other U.S. law school, and to do so regardless of financial position. His generosity is seen in the boundless time, energy, and attention he devotes to countless students, former students, mentees, colleagues, and friends – listening, counselling, challenging, encouraging, and supporting them. His optimism and positivity have been instrumental in launching the many groundbreaking programs which have been met with great success during his tenure, including the HLS international exchange programs. His compassion and respect for all people, regardless of circumstance, has been evident in his work with the Special Olympics and the Harvard Law School Project on Disability. His wisdom has been a key guiding influence on countless successful careers of his former students and mentees, and has been recognized in his selection as faculty advisor to the Harvard Men’s Varsity Ice Hockey Team. His thoughtfulness is felt in virtually every interaction with him. The combination of all of these amazing personal qualities, rather remarkably found all in one person, has made Bill Alford one of the best ambassadors Harvard Law School has ever had.

Dominic Moore
Harvard College ’03, Professional Hockey Player

On June 6, 1966, Robert Kennedy delivered an address to students at the University of Cape Town. Given at the height of South African apartheid, with Nelson Mandela still in prison, the speech is considered one of the most important of his life.

“It is from numberless, diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.”

Professionally, Dean Alford’s individual excellence and cooperative leadership have been immensely impactful, and there are many who can speak more insightfully than I can to highlight those significant achievements.

What I can share is the impact Bill has made in my life as a mentor and friend. Since I joined the Harvard Men’s Ice Hockey team back in 1999, Bill has served as a friend and faculty fellow of the program, combining his love for sports with his compassion and care for students. Over two decades, Bill has mentored me, as well as close to two hundred other student-athletes, making it his mission to enrich our experience and encourage us to lead better, more productive lives. Whether it be organizing educational opportunities, building relationships between faculty and students, or offering academic and career guidance, Bill always has time for those within his reach. Amazingly, that generosity only continues after students leave Cambridge. In 2013, ten years after my graduation, Bill was instrumental in helping me establish a charitable foundation, which continues to make a positive impact in the area of rare cancer research, with Bill’s continued support.

Both professionally and personally, Bill’s kindness and generosity are reflected in an abundance of actions both large and small, simple yet profound, spontaneous yet intentional, that have sent, and will continue to send, a ripple effect that is felt far and wide.

Mark Jia
J.D.’16, Harvard Law School; Former Research Fellow, East Asian Legal Studies Program

I am so pleased that the Harvard International Law Journal is celebrating Bill Alford’s career at the conclusion of his 18-year service as Vice Dean.  

Bill’s contributions to the international endeavor at Harvard Law School are inestimable. He is a giant in the field of Chinese law, and a pioneering figure in U.S.-China exchange. In my own life, he has been a devoted teacher, a generous mentor, and a model scholar and person.   

In relation to Bill, I will always think of myself first as his student. His 1L course, Comparative Law: Why Law? Lessons from China, was an engrossing introduction to comparative law by way of China. More than anything else, it was this course, and Bill’s teaching, that cemented my passion for the subject. The course stressed context over form, history over hysteria, forcing us—Bill’s students—to confront profound and difficult questions around law and legality. Every element of the course—topics, readings, speakers, films, and pedagogy—reflected Bill’s meticulous and erudite approach to the study of China. 

In my own career, Bill has supported me in more ways than I can count—writing letters, making introductions, creating research and teaching opportunities, and dispensing encouragement and advice. He has read drafts of everything I have written on Chinese law, with comments that never failed to press on my assumptions or to push my thinking. For as long as I write on this subject, I will always be writing for Professor Alford.  

As an aspiring law scholar, what I admire most about Bill’s writing—and what I have (poorly) sought to emulate in my own work—is its conscientiousness. Bill does not overstate. He does not understate. His analyses are scrupulously careful, managing a skepticism of every tradition’s conventional wisdoms while according due respect to setting and difference. The result is scholarship that persuades through rigor rather than ideology, reason rather than volume. His book, To Steal a Book is an Elegant Offense, well illustrates this analytic style. He opens with a thoughtful exposition on methodology, stressing problems of language, culture, and “[t]he need to guard against extrapolating normality from the West.” But, as he later shows, one can be mindful of methodological pitfalls while still perceptive of the Chinese leadership’s own failures in “proclaiming rights without being constrained by” them.  

Finally, Bill has modeled in his life and in his work a humility and a humanity to which we should all aspire. At a time of global tension, we would all benefit from following Bill’s example, rooted, at bottom, in his fundamental decency.  

Jedidiah Kroncke
Associate Professor of Law, The University of Hong Kong

To me, Bill Alford’s legacy epitomizes the often invisible but decidedly crucial generosities that sustain academic life. Whether as a teacher, mentor or colleague, Bill has devoted great energy to building spaces of community and forums of engagement for students and scholars who often find themselves far from home while in Cambridge. The generational impact of such contribution is now evident across the world in networks suffused not only with ideas and intellect but also compassion and humanity. In a field that often privileges judgments of individual achievement and brilliance, Bill has demonstrated how an original and pioneering scholar can make their mark while also nurturing those around them. As someone who benefited greatly from his generosity, I clearly see this example as one I continually strive to live up to in my own career.

Leia Castañeda Anastacio

LL.M. ’96 and S.J.D. ’09, Harvard Law School

I was six years out from my LL.M. graduation, and my family had just relocated from New England to the Deep South. I had a toddler and a newborn. I had also just written my first original work of legal history, but lived 200 miles away from the nearest law school. If anyone had told me then that I would return to Harvard Law School, graduate with my S.J.D. degree, win legal history prizes, and publish my dissertation with Cambridge University Press, I would have been hard-pressed to believe them. Having just settled in the suburbs of Muscle Shoals, Alabama, I found the prospect of pursuing legal historical scholarship in earnest a daft dream. But with Professor Alford’s help, I got my dream shot. 

Commending my first foray into legal history, Professor Alford inevitably followed up with the practical concern, “so what would you like to do?” When I disclosed that I wanted to do legal history and had always regretted not pursuing the S.J.D., he encouraged me to apply while cautioning me that competition would be especially keen for the coming academic year. It was the winter of 2002, and with 09/11 throwing the job market for LL.M. graduates into greater uncertainty, the HLS Graduate Program expected S.J.D. applications to double, even triple, in number. Nonetheless, with Professor Alford’s guidance, the fall of 2002 saw me making my way, half-dazed, past Langdell and Griswold and towards Pound to register for my mandatory year in residence. I could scarcely believe I was back. And was I ever.

Juggling the demands of a doctoral program with marriage and motherhood was always going to be challenging, but in Professor Alford, I could not have found a more supportive and understanding supervisor and mentor, nor in the HLS Graduate Program that he ran, more flexible and accommodating logistics. Guiding with a firm hand but a light touch, his incisive critiques zeroed in on the weakest spots in my work, but were sufficiently constructive to point me towards the right direction, yet open-ended enough to enable me to grapple with theories, methodologies, sources, and data after my own fashion and figure a way towards my own answers, in the process allowing me to find my voice as a scholar. For its part, the Graduate Program worked with me to set a congenial timetable to fulfill requirements. 

My return to HLS occasioned another homecoming – that with the East Asian Legal Studies Program with which I had previously been a visiting scholar. As EALS director, Professor Alford provided this primarily off-campus student a home base that anchored me to the HLS community and shaped my experience and thus my memories of Harvard. As with its director, so does EALS represent the best in Harvard – its unrelenting quest for knowledge and excellence, its openness to difference and willingness to engage with both rigor and respect, its commitment to global transformation. As Vice Dean, Professor Alford imbued the Graduate Program with this same spirit, and under his stewardship, it has grown into a similarly warm, collaborative, and tight-knit family of dedicated scholars.

But perhaps what I am most grateful for is Professor Alford’s great faith in his students. In us, he often sees a potential greater than what even we might allow ourselves to imagine. But it is precisely this faith that drove me to accomplish the kind of scholarship that he believed I was capable of. And his is not an amorphous, ephemeral faith by any means, for it comes backed up by deeds through his enthusiastic support, both moral and material, of our pursuit of professional opportunities and ventures. Quite simply, he helps you get your dream shot and make the dream real. I doubt I would have become a legal historian but for his help. 

For everything that he has done for and been to me, I will never be able to thank Professor Alford enough. I wish him always and only the best as he embarks on this new phase in his professional and personal life.