John F. Manning

Harvard Law School today announced plans to make its online, pre-term course for incoming law students, Zero-L, available to other U.S. law schools for free again for a second year as law schools emerge from the pandemic. Beginning in the summer of 2022, HLS will return to its pre-pandemic plan to offer Zero-L as an educational tool that other law schools can purchase for a reasonable fee to share with their students... “We created Zero-L several years ago to help incoming Harvard Law students from all backgrounds gain a common baseline of knowledge as they begin their law school careers,” said Harvard Law School Dean John F. Manning ’85. “As the first in my family to graduate from college and the first to go to law school, I often had the feeling that everyone around me just got law school as soon as they walked through the door, and that I didn’t. Zero-L aims to help all new students feel prepared to succeed on day one.” Zero-L’s faculty director, Professor I. Glenn Cohen ’03, recalled his experience as a new law student similarly. “Like many law students, I found the first few months of law school daunting,” Cohen explained last May. “We built this program to substitute a ‘smooth on-ramp’ for the ‘steep climb’ I and many others encountered upon starting law school.”

Lisa Dealy, who as assistant dean for the Harvard Law School Clinical and Pro Bono Programs for 15 years was instrumental in the transformational growth and reimagination of clinical education at HLS, will retire May 27 after 30 years at the law school. When Dealy assumed leadership of the clinical and pro programs in 2005, HLS offered a handful of in-house and externship clinics and five Student Practice Organizations (SPOs). As a result of her commitment to clinical education, HLS today has 22 in-house clinics, 14 externship clinics, and 11 SPOs, providing students with a vast array of choices for obtaining practical experience and working in the public interest on vital and leading-edge legal issues. “Lisa Dealy has been a tremendous leader, a dedicated colleague, a compassionate and wise mentor to many students, and a wonderful friend to so many,” said HLS Dean John F. Manning ’85. “Throughout her years at HLS, she has exemplified the spirit of public service, and she has made a lasting impact here at HLS and well beyond our campus.”

During her first year as the sole woman on the US Supreme Court in 2006, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote a foreword for a biography of the 19th-century lawyer Belva Ann Lockwood and presented the book to a new law clerk in her chambers. On Thursday, the clerk, Daphna Renan, now a professor at Harvard Law School, highlighted the foreword as an example of how Ginsburg broke barriers for women while simultaneously honoring her predecessors in the fight for equality. “Justice Ginsburg was a giant in the law, a luminary, and a leader, as you’ve heard, but she was always ... keenly aware of those who paved the way for her even as she trained her sights on how she could better pave it for others,” Renan said. She delivered the remarks during a virtual Harvard Law School event honoring Ginsburg, who died last Friday...Harvard Law’s current dean, John F. Manning, said the institution regrets the discrimination Ginsburg endured on campus. “It is hard to imagine a more consequential life, a life of greater meaning, and more lasting impact. And Justice Ginsburg did all of this while carrying the heavy weight imposed by discrimination,” he said. “To our eternal regret, she encountered it here at Harvard Law School.” The virtual event included tributes from Tomiko Brown-Nagin, dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and Harvard Law professors Vicki Jackson, Martha Minow, and Michael Klarman...Brown-Nagin’s remarks explored what Ginsburg’s death means to the civil rights movement and comparisons between Ginsburg and the late Justice Thurgood Marshall, the first Black man to serve on the Supreme Court. Beyond fighting for women’s rights, Brown-Nagin said, Ginsburg had a deep understanding of racial discrimination and poured that insight into cases dealing with race. She cited Ginsburg’s dissent in a 1995 school desegregation case in Missouri in which the justice wrote it was too soon to curtail efforts to combat racial segregation given the state’s history of racial inequality. “The Court stresses that the present remedial programs have been in place for seven years,” Ginsburg wrote. “But compared to more than two centuries of firmly entrenched official discrimination, the experience with the desegregation remedies ordered by the [lower court] has been evanescent.” Ginsburg was, Brown-Nagin said, a “tremendous intellect, a courageous human being, and a giant of the law.”