Martha Minow

Martha Minow holds the 300th Anniversary University Professorship at Harvard University and is one of 25 professors accorded this highest academic post at the university. University professorships recognize groundbreaking work crossing the boundaries of multiple disciplines and are authorized to pursue research and teaching at any of Harvard’s Schools.  She has taught at Harvard Law School since 1981 and served as dean for eight years (2009-2017). 

Her prior 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; and Between Vengeance and Forgiveness: Facing History After Genocide and Mass Violence (1998).  Recent publications include “The Unraveling: What Dobbs May Mean for Contraception, Liberty, and Constitutionalism,” in Lee C. Bollinger and Geoffrey Stone, eds., Roe v. Dobbs: The Past, Present, and Future of a Constitutional Right to Abortion (2024); “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.

Minow’s courses include civil procedure, constitutional law, fairness and privacy, family law, international criminal law, jurisprudence, law and education, nonprofit organizations and the law, and the workshop on public law. An expert in constitutional law and human rights, her work has focused on issues confronting historically marginalized individuals and groups, legal responses to social, political, and religious conflict, and legal treatments of digital communications and technologies. 

Currently the co-chair of the Access to Justice Project of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Minow also chair’s the Board of Trustees of the MacArthur Foundation and serves on the boards of other philanthropies, including the Carnegie Corporation and the SCE Foundation.  She also is a board member at GBH (public media) and 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 Sargent Shriver Equal Justice Award (2016); the Joseph B. and Toby Gittler Prize, Brandeis University (2016); ten honorary degrees (in law, education, and humane letters) from schools in three countries; the Gold Medal for Outstanding Contribution to Public Discourse, awarded by the College Historical Society of Trinity College, Dublin, in recognition of efforts to promote discourse and intellectualism on a world stage; the Holocaust Center Award; and the Sacks-Freund Teaching Award, awarded by the Harvard Law School graduating class.

She previously chaired the board of directors for 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 Iranian Human Rights Documentation Center; and Facing History and Ourselves, where she chaired the Scholars’ Board. A fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences since 1992, Minow has also been a senior fellow of Harvard’s Society of Fellows, a member of Harvard University Press Board of Syndics, a senior fellow and acting director of what is now Harvard’s Safra Foundation Center on Ethics, a fellow of the American Bar Foundation and a Fellow of the American Philosophical Society.