Martha Minow

In the most recent wave of activism at the Law School, some students are calling on the school to eliminate tuition completely as part of their new campaign for financial justice. Members of the group Reclaim Harvard Law published an open letter Sunday addressed to Law School Dean Martha L. Minow and members of the Harvard Corporation—the University’s highest governing body—demanding an end to tuition. ...“[The seal change] is a great symbolic gesture, but we wanted to make sure that there are concrete economic steps that are taken so that students of color and students from low income backgrounds are less marginalized,” Reclaim Harvard Law member Sarah B. Cohen said. “This is aligned with our racial justice goals and a natural continuation of our activism.”

The IMLS grant awards over $700,000 to the Harvard Law School Library Innovation Lab, in cooperation with the Berkman Center for Internet & Society and more than 130 partner libraries, to sustainably scale Perma.cc to combat link rot in all scholarly fields.

How can you defend a foreigner who came to the United States with the likely intent of causing harm to Americans? For attorney James B. Donovan, a 1940 graduate of Harvard Law School, the real question at the height of the Cold War was: How can you not?...In 1962, with the backing of President John F. Kennedy ’40, Donovan traveled to East Berlin to negotiate a swap: Abel for American spy plane pilot Francis Gary Powers, imprisoned in the USSR. At Harvard Law School in the late 1930s, Donovan lived in Walter Hastings Hall, served as chair of the Law School yearbook, and studied under later Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter. As an alumnus, he donated his legal fee from the Abel case to Harvard and two other universities. On Wednesday, the Law School’s Program on Negotiation will present a screening of Steven Spielberg’s “Bridge of Spies,” a film about the Abel-Powers negotiations in which Tom Hanks plays Donovan. Afterward, Dean Martha Minow will discuss the film with Professor Michael Wheeler of the Business School; Donovan’s granddaughter Beth Amorosi, president of AMO Communications LLC; and Donovan’s grandson John Amorosi, partner in the law firm of Davis Polk & Wardwell.

...[Merrick] Garland, now chief judge of the federal appeals court in Washington and President Obama’s nominee to the Supreme Court, has deftly navigated the capital’s high-powered legal circles for decades...Today, he has a talent for letting others talk about themselves. Whether in a meeting or at a party, he leans slightly toward whoever is speaking, head nodding. “He’s absorbing what he hears and integrating it,” said Martha Minow, the dean at Harvard Law School.

An op-ed by Martha Minow and Deanell Tacha. Sometimes you don’t value what you have until you experience its absence close up. We each are deans of law schools; we each have seen, close up, nations without courts independent of political or partisan control. Plagued by conflict and distrust, countries without operating independent judiciaries struggle to earn local and international confidence. In the United States, we see how a fair, impartial, unbiased, and nonpolitical judiciary is central to American justice, permitting economic exchange and peaceful solutions to disagreements. This treasure depends upon the aspiration to maintain a government of laws, not men, focused on each case decided in light of the factual record and not political winds or personal preferences. And this treasure is in jeopardy at the highest level if the Senate refuses even to consider the president’s nominee to be the next associate justice of the Supreme Court.

Perhaps no one in the Boston area was watching as President Obama announced his Supreme Court nominee with more anticipation than the people at Harvard Law School...Martha Minow, dean of Harvard Law School, remembers him in his days in private practice in Washington and says Garland has served as her informal advisor. Minow joined WBUR’s All Things Considered to discuss the nomination.

President Obama’s nominee to the Supreme Court, Merrick Garland, is expected to meet with several U.S. senators on Capitol Hill Thursday, where Republicans have promised to block any confirmation hearing. Garland, who is currently chief justice of the Circuit Court of Appeals in the District of Columbia, has maintained a strong bond with Harvard — where he attended both undergrad and law school. If confirmed, Merrick Garland would be the 20th Harvard Law School graduate on the nation’s highest court. That number is twice as many as Yale, which has had 10 graduates on the court. Professor Richard Lazarus was in his office at Harvard Law School watching on his computer as the president of the United States nominated his friend, Garland, for a seat on the Supreme Court...“He was also a leader when he was here as a student,” said Lazarus...Martha Minow, dean of Harvard Law, said Garland “makes even hard conversations better.” “He is someone who cuts to the heart of the matter, but listens very hard to all points of view,” she continued. “And in addition, he has a great sense of humor.”

The Harvard Corporation on Monday approved a recommendation to retire the Harvard Law School shield, which came under fire amid student protests last fall because of its ties to the family of Isaac Royall Jr., a Massachusetts slaveholder who helped to establish the School through a bequest from his estate. In a letter to Harvard Law School Dean Martha Minow, President Drew Faust and Corporation senior fellow William F. Lee said the School “should feel free to discontinue use of the shield.” With that response, the Harvard Corporation affirmed the recommendation of a committee appointed by Minow that the controversial shield be replaced. “If the Law School is to have an official symbol, it must closely represent the values of the Law School, which the current shield does not,” the committee wrote earlier this month. In an email to the HLS community Monday afternoon, Minow thanked the president and the Corporation, as well as the members of the committee whose recommendation the Corporation approved. She acknowledged that retiring the shield “will take some time, but the work has begun.”

For 80 years, Harvard Law School has been represented by a shield that features Harvard’s motto, Veritas (“truth”) and three sheaves of wheat. But it turns out that the traditional-looking logo isn’t so innocent: Its design was based on the coat of arms of a slaveholder known for treating his slaves with brutal cruelty. Now, reports Arun Rath for NPR, the Dean of Harvard Law School, Martha Minow, has endorsed changing the school's official shield—but questions about slavery’s legacy on campus remain. ... They seem to have prevailed: On March 4, Dean Martha Minow announced that she would endorse the recommendation from a committee of Harvard Law School faculty, students, alumni and staff assembled in November to revise the school’s shield. “Its association with slavery does not represent the values and aspirations of Harvard Law School...it has become a source of division rather than commonality in our community.”