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Dan Coquillette

  • Confronting Academia’s Ties to Slavery

    March 6, 2017

    ...On Friday, Harvard’s president, Drew Gilpin Faust, stood at a lectern under a projection of Renty’s face and began a rather different enterprise: a major public conference exploring the long-neglected connections between universities and slavery. Harvard had been “directly complicit” in slavery, Ms. Faust acknowledged, before moving to a more present-minded statement of purpose...There were gasps when Daniel R. Coquillette, co-author of a recent history of Harvard Law School, recounted how Isaac Royall Jr., a West Indian planter whose financial gifts led to the founding of the school, helped brutally put down a slave rebellion on Antigua during which dozens were drawn and quartered or burned at the stake.

  • Photo of visitors from HLS outside the The Royall House and Slave Quarters in Medford, Massachusetts

    The slavery legacy up close: Halley brings students to the Royall Slave Quarters

    October 18, 2016

    Earlier this month, Harvard Law School’s Royall Professor of Law, Janet Halley, took first-year HLS students in her Reading Group on the Law School’s connection to New England’s slavery heritage to visit the Royall House and Slave Quarters in Medford, Massachusetts.

  • Committee exploring whether Harvard Law School shield should be changed

    November 30, 2015

    Harvard Law School Dean Martha Minow has announced the creation of a committee to research if the school should continue to use its current shield. The shield is the coat of arms of the family of Isaac Royall, whose bequest endowed the first professorship of law at Harvard.

  • Celebration 45

    February 25, 1999

    Since the first alumnae of 1953, more than 5,000 women have claimed their place at HLS. Hundreds came back to the School in November to applaud Attorney General Janet Reno '63 as she accepted the Celebration 45 Award, and to connect with the other remarkable women of Harvard Law.