Class.forName(String cn) is a convenient method equivalent to:
   Class.forName(cn, true, currentLoader);

Class.forName(String) method will load a class and its <clinit> will
be invoked.

To load a class but to skip class initialization using the defining loader 
of the caller's class, it will have to call, e.g. if call from an instance method:
   Class.forName(cn, false, this.getClass().getClassLoader());

Additional comment from Remi Forax [1]:
> In fact, this method is really useful, most of the tools that does 
> bytecode transformation at runtime (most O/R mappers, 
> dynamic language runtimes, profilers, code coverage tools, etc)
> are now required to compute the stack frame attribute which requires to 
> compute the lower upper bound of a set of types. For that, being able
> to crawle the type hierachy without loading the static initializer
> is a must have.

[1] http://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/jigsaw-dev/2012-May/002529.html