Martha Minow

Martha Minow, dean of Harvard Law School, will step down at the end of the academic year, the school announced Tuesday. Minow, 62, said she plans to return to teaching and advocacy, and will complete a book about law and alternative ways to resolve disputes. She has been a member of the Harvard Law faculty since 1981. "My plan was to do five years," Minow said in an interview Tuesday. "I've had the unbelievable privilege and good fortune since I was a young professor to be devoted to teaching and scholarship. I was surprised to be asked to be dean when Elena Kagan left for Washington. I was willing to step in at that time. Obviously, that was a time of transition for the school and a time of great challenges, given the economic crisis. I was glad to do that, but I stayed longer than planned."

Dean of Harvard Law School Martha L. Minow will step down at the end of the academic year to return to teaching full-time, ending an eight-year tenure as dean that spanned a global financial crisis, federal Title IX scrutiny, and widespread student protest...“Being a scholar and a teacher was my highest aspiration. I’ve loved it and I am eager to return to it,” Minow said in an interview...“I cannot imagine as good a dean for the Law School [as Minow],” Law School professor Laurence H. Tribe said. “I think that Drew Faust made a wise and brilliant selection in persuading Martha to become dean of the law school and I look forward to working with President Faust to finding a successor, but I think Martha’s shoes are impossible to fill.”...Nino Monea, the Law School’s student body president, said he enjoyed working with Minow, even as he challenged her and the administration to address student concerns...Law School professor Bruce H. Mann said he regarded Minow as someone who lives by her principles and has done a terrific job of leading the Law School.

In a report released today, Harvard University details the path it took to achieving its goal to reduce greenhouse gas emissions 30 percent by 2016 from a 2006 baseline, inclusive of campus growth....Harvard is funding a three-year, multidisciplinary graduate-level Climate Solutions Living Lab course as well as research projects to design and analyze various off-site means to achieve carbon neutrality. Research findings will inform the University’s approach to coupling off-campus emissions reduction opportunities with on-campus efforts to meet its long-term climate commitment.“Not only will this course and others like it provide students with the opportunity explore real law and policy challenges related to climate change, it will be a model for collaborative learning by leveraging the expertise of faculty, students, and staff across our many Schools to devise solutions together,” said Martha Minow, the Morgan and Helen Chu Dean and Professor of Law at Harvard Law School.

President Barack Obama will award Chicago’s legendary Newton Minow a Presidential Medal of Freedom on Tuesday, coming full circle from when Minow met him as a law student spending a summer at his Loop law firm...He is the former Federal Communications Commission chairman who famously called television a “vast wasteland” in a 1961 speech about broadcasting and the public interest. “He found a path that dealt always with mass communications as a way to enhance democracy,” Martha, one of Minow’s three daughters, told me on Monday.

For two years, Harvard’s admissions policies have been at the center of an ongoing lawsuit alleging race-based discrimination against Asian American applicants. The case was put on hold in advance of a Supreme Court ruling on the affirmative action case Fisher vs. The University of Texas at Austin. Now that the Court upheld that admissions policy over the summer, Harvard’s case is again moving forward. ,,,Harvard Law School Dean Martha L. Minow also filed an amicus brief in conjunction with her legal counsel and Yale Law School Dean Robert C. Post ’69 last November in support of UT Austin. They wrote that a ruling against using race as one factor in a “holistic” admissions process would have “devastating” effects.

At a lecture Thursday, Harvard Law School Dean Martha L. Minow emphasized the benefits of resolving bioethical issues through mediation, rather than litigation Minow gave her speech at the Harvard Medical School’s annual George W. Gay Lecture, an event HMS describes on its website as “quite possibly the oldest medical ethics lectureship in the United States.” ...She began by discussing Zubik v. Burwell, a 2016 Supreme Court case brought by a group of religious non-profits challenging the contraception coverage requirement in the Affordable Care Act. Minow called the case, which was ultimately sent back to the lower courts without a decision, a key example of the interplay between medicine and law, and an example of the justice system failing to resolve a bioethical issue.

This year, Dorothy E. Roberts ’80, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School and a leading scholar on legal and biosocial theory, is…