Martha Minow

Martha Minow holds the 300th Anniversary University Professorship at Harvard University; she has taught at Harvard Law School since 1981 and served as dean for eight years (2009-2017).  An expert in constitutional law and human rights, her work has focused on issues of exclusion and discrimination, legal responses to social, political, and religious conflict, and legal treatments of communications and new technologies.   

Her books include Saving the News: Why the Constitution Calls for Government Action to Preserve the Freedom of Speech (2021); When Should Law Forgive? (2019); In Brown’s Wake: Legacies of America’s Constitutional Landmark (2010); Partners, Not Rivals: Privatization and the Public Good (2002); Between Vengeance and Forgiveness: Facing History After Genocide and Mass Violence (1998); and Making All the Difference: Inclusion, Exclusion, and American Law (1990).  Recent articles include “Justice in Divided Societies,” 4 American Journal of Law and Equality 402 (2024), https://direct.mit.edu/ajle/article/doi/10.1162/ajle_a_00064/125071/JUSTICE-IN-DIVIDED-SOCIETIES-Presented-as-the; “Walls or Bridges: Law’s Role in Conflicts over Religion and Equal Treatment,” 48 Brigham Young L. Rev. 1581 (2023), https://digitalcommons.law.byu.edu/lawreview/vol48/iss5/7/; and “Distrust of Artificial Intelligence: Sources and Responses from Computer Science and Law,” with Cynthia Dwork, Daedalus (2022), https://www.amacad.org/sites/default/files/publication/downloads/Daedalus_Sp22_22_Dwork-%26-Minow.pdf.  She is currently writing book for University of California Press addressing the preconditions needed for a sustainable constitutional democracy.  

The chair of the board of Massachusetts public media (GBH) and co-chair of the Access to Justice Project of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Minow serves on the boards of other philanthropies, including the Carnegie Corporation and the SCE Foundation.  She also is a board member at the Campaign Legal Center, a nonpartisan organization devoted to strengthening electoral and voting processes in the United States. 

Minow previously served on the Center for Strategic and International Studies Commission on Countering Violent Extremism and on the Independent International Commission Kosovo. She helped to launch Imagine Co-existence, a program of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, to promote peaceful development in post-conflict societies. Her five-year partnership with the federal Department of Education and the Center for Applied Special Technology worked to increase access to the curriculum with digital resources for students with disabilities and resulted in both legislative initiatives and a voluntary national standard opening access to curricular materials for individuals with disabilities. 

Her honors include lifetime achievement awards from the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press (2023) and the Ruth Bader Ginsburg Lifetime Achievement Award from the Women in Legal Education Section of the American Association of Law Schools (2024); the Joseph B. and Toby Gittler Prize, Brandeis University (2016); the Holocaust Center (Massachusetts, 2006), and ten honorary degrees (in law, education, and humane letters) from schools in three countries. 

She previously chaired the board of directors for the MacArthur Foundation (Chicago), the Revson Foundation (New York) and the John F. Kennedy Library Profiles in Courage selection committee. Following nomination by President Obama and confirmation by the Senate, she served on the board of the Legal Services Corporation, the bi-partisan, government-sponsored organization that provides civil legal assistance to low-income Americans.  Her past board service also includes the American Bar Foundation; the CBS Corporation; the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law; the Covenant Foundation; the Jewish Women’s Archive, the Iranian Human Rights Documentation Center.  She previously chaired and still serves on the Scholars’ Board of Facing History and Ourselves.