Russian Prof To Teach At Harvard Law

A Soviet professor has accepted an invitation to lecture at the Law School this fall, the CRIMSON learned yesterday.

According to a notice posted at the Law School, Boris S. Nikiforov, Professor of Criminal Law at Moscow State University, will conduct the course, a comparison of Soviet and American law, for one month. Harold J. Berman, Professor of Law, will lecture during the remainder of the half-year course.

Erwin N. Griswold, Dean of the Faculty of Law, invited several leading Russian jurists to teach at the Law School during an entire term. Nikiforov, however, the only professor known to have accepted the invitation to date, is due to arrive Oct. 21 and plans to spend only two months in this country.

Head of the Criminal Law Department of the Institute for the Study of Causes and the Prevention of Crime of the Procurator's Office of the U.S.S.R., Nikiforov is tentatively scheduled to give several public lectures during his stay at Harvard. He is the author of three legal works: Object of Crime, Obtaining Property by False Pretenses; Criminal Law Protection of Personal Property; and Criminal Legislation of the Republic of India. Nikiforov edited the Russian translation of Kenny's Outline of Criminal Law.

Nikiforov served as consultant in the compilation of The Fundamentals of Criminal Legislation, Legal Code of 1958; and in the 1960 Criminal Code of the R.S.F.S.R. and that of other Union Republics. Fifty-year-old Nikiforov is also a people's Assessor of the Supreme Court of the R.S.F.S.R.

The last Soviet professor to lecture at Harvard, K.Y, Kondratiev, a physicist, came here two years ago under the Lacey-Zarubin agreement, a faculty-exchange agreement between Harvard and the University of Leningrad. Four other professors scheduled to visit at that time did not come to Cambridge.