John F. Manning

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.”

She entered Harvard Law School in 1956 as just one of a few women enrolled in a class of 500. A few years later, the woman who would one day sit on the US Supreme Court was famously rejected by dozens of New York City law firms because of her gender. But over the decades that followed, Ruth Bader Ginsburg built a remarkable career as a legal and cultural icon who used her intelligence and courage to fight fearlessly for social justice. And after her death was announced on Friday, entire generations of lawyers — women and men alike — grieved for a jurist whose legacy somehow transcended even the highest court in the nation. “Justice Ginsburg personified the best of what it meant to be a judge,” Harvard Law School Dean John F. Manning said in a statement. “She brought a deep intellectual and personal integrity to everything she did. Her powerful and unyielding commitment to the rule of law and to equal justice under law place her among the great Justices in the annals of the Court.” Martha Minow, a former dean of Harvard Law School, recalled Ginsburg’s impact on her own legal career. “I am one of countless people she directly encouraged and deeply inspired to use reason and argument in service of justice and humanity. Justice Ginsburg also showed that it is possible to build deep and meaningful friendships with people despite severe disagreements. At this time of deep social and political divisions, there is much to learn from her life and her commitments,” Minow said in a statement...Nancy Gertner, a retired US district court judge and a professor at Harvard Law School, said Ginsburg had inspired generations of women and wound up a reluctant pop culture icon while approaching the law as “a craftsperson who cared about the court’s precedents and was going to work within them.” “Ruth Ginsburg was more than just a brilliant scholar, and a liberal, which is what the press reduced her to,” Gertner said by phone. “She essentially created the law of gender and race discrimination. From the time she was a lawyer, a litigator, she was raising issues about the nuance of discrimination.”