Preet Bharara ’90, U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York since 2009, and comedic actress and writer Mindy Kaling will be the 2014 Class Day speakers for Harvard Law School on Wednesday, May 28, the school has announced.
Bharara has focused on preventing large-scale financial fraud by creating the Complex Frauds Unit, an agency that has collected close to $500 million in settlements since its inception, including multimillion-dollar settlements with Deutsche Bank and CitiMortgage for faulty lending practices. The unit also monitors cybercrime and has prosecuted core members of computer-hacking groups; in conjunction with the FBI, it recently announced the largest international takedown of defendants “allegedly engaged in the theft of personal identification information and other crimes over the Internet,” according to the Department of Justice.
Bharara also formed the Terrorism and International Narcotics Unit, responsible for prosecuting leaders of organizations that engage in transnational acts of terrorism, narco-terrorism, narcotics trafficking, and money laundering. Since late 2009, his office has convicted more than a thousand of the approximately 1,300 people charged in 52 large-scale drug and gang takedowns, according to the New York Daily News; Bharara himself has been dubbed the “Sheriff of Wall Street.” “We care about crime that occurs on Wall Street, and terrorism is our highest priority,” Bharara said to The New York Daily News this month.
Mindy Kaling—best known for portraying Kelly Kapoor on the NBC sitcom The Office and for creating, writing, and starring in her own sitcom on Fox, The Mindy Project—is an actress, comedian, writer, and producer who has been nominated five consecutive times for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Comedy Series as a producer of The Office. She has appeared in the films This Is the End, Wreck-It Ralph, and The Five-Year Engagement, among others, and is also known for her comedic memoir, Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns). Last year, Entertainment Weekly called her one of the "50 Coolest and Most Creative Entertainers" in Hollywood, and its sister publication, Time magazine, recognized her as one of the 100 most influential people in the world.
“I’m a feminist who wants to work with other feminists,” Kaling recently told actress and writer Lena Dunham in an interview published in Rolling Stone. “I would wager that only a masochist sexist would want to work at a show with an opinionated female lead and showrunner. So I work with people who love women. That's a nice thing.”
Bharara and Kaling will speak at Holmes Field on May 28, at a time to be announced.
