Martha Minow

As college students across the country press their institutions to confront the experiences of campus minorities, law schools and their students and alumni are increasingly being drawn into the debates. On Monday, Harvard Law School announced the formation of a committee to consider whether the school should continue to use as its seal a shield that was once the family crest of Isaac Royall Jr., a Massachusetts slave owner who endowed Harvard’s first professorship of law. A group of Harvard Law School faculty will determine “whether the Royall crest should be discarded from our shield,” said the school’s dean, Martha Minow, in a statement. “Through that process, we will gain a better sense of what course of action should be recommended and pursued, and we will discuss and understand important aspects of our history and what defines us today and tomorrow as a community dedicated to justice, diversity, equality, and inclusion.”

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.

On the heels of an incident of racially-charged vandalism on campus, Harvard Law School Dean Martha L. Minow has appointed a committee to reconsider the school’s controversial seal—the crest of the former slaveholding Royall family that endowed Harvard’s first law professorship in the 19th century...Law professor Bruce H. Mann will serve as the chair of the committee, according to Minow’s email. Mann will be joined by Law professors Tomiko Brown-Nagin, Annette Gordon-Reed, Janet E. Halley, and Samuel Moyn...Two students and an alumnus will also serve on the committee.

In a rare public appearance on the evening of November 20th, John Roberts, the chief justice of the United States, gave a talk at the New York University School of Law. The subject of the chief’s presentation was one of Mr Roberts’s predecessors: Charles Evans Hughes, the white-bearded, aquiline-nosed figure who steered the Supreme Court through the fraught New Deal era in the 1930s. ... Martha Minow, dean of the Harvard Law School, wrote recently that Mr Roberts has, “right from the start”, shown “mastery and deft management” in his leadership of the Court. A couple of somewhat intemperate dissents to one side—in the same-sex marriage case last summer, he wrote that “[f]ive lawyers have closed the debate and enacted their own vision of marriage, [s]tealing this issue from the people”—Ms Minow’s assessment is just about right.  

Black slashes of tape appeared across the portraits of some African-American professors at Harvard Law School on Thursday morning, outraging students and faculty members and touching off a day of discussion about racial injustice at the school. In a statement, the school’s dean, Martha Minow, said that the portraits, which appeared on walls inside the building, had been “defaced” and that the Harvard University Police Department was investigating the incident as a hate crime. “This is my portrait at Harvard Law School,” wrote Professor Ronald S. Sullivan Jr., on his Twitter account, along with a photograph of his portrait, with a wide piece of gaffer’s tape placed diagonally across his face...“I woke up to a bunch of texts,” said Kyle Strickland, the president of the law school’s student body. “As a black student, it was extremely offensive. And I know the investigation’s ongoing; we’ll see what happened, but to me it seemed like a pretty clear act of intolerance, racism.”

Harvard University police are investigating a possible hate crime at the law school after someone covered portraits of black faculty members in tape, according to university officials. Some photographs, housed in Wasserstein Hall on the Cambridge, Massachusetts, campus, were defaced with strips of black tape and discovered Thursday morning...Harvard Law School students quickly rallied in solidarity with their professors. A.J. Clayborne, who will graduate in 2016, told CNN that the response on campus was "fairly overwhelming" and that students "are shocked." He said that students met to organize in light of the incident..."There has been an outpouring of warm wishes for the affected faculty from Harvard Law students, some of whom posted signed messages of support," said Dr. Tomiko Brown-Nagin, a professor of constitutional law at the school, in a statement to CNN. "I am so proud of the students for reacting with love and kindness, for showing leadership, and for valuing inclusion."..."I was shocked to see portraits of black faculty members defaced today in an apparent response to the peaceful protest organized by Harvard's black students on yesterday," said Dr. Ronald Sullivan Jr., who is the director of the Harvard Criminal Justice Institute. "My shock and dismay, however, were replaced with joy and admiration when I saw the lovely notes of affirmation and appreciation that Harvard law students placed on our portraits."

When students and faculty arrived at Harvard Law School’s Wasserstein Hall Thursday morning, they found a disturbing sight. On a wall of portraits of the law school’s tenured faculty, black tape had been placed over each of the African American faculty members. A second-year student called the tape “a hate crime” in a widely shared Blavitypost that included pictures of the portraits. Dean Martha Minow said that racism is a “serious problem” at the school. Police say they are investigating.

Black tape, stuck systematically across the portraits of black law professors, spurred on Thursday a police investigation into vandalism and a pronouncement from the dean of Harvard Law School that the school has a “serious problem” with racism. ... Law School professor Charles J. Ogletree, whose portrait was among those vandalized, said he was still waiting to learn more about the incident before making too strong of a judgement. “We’re just trying to figure out what happened and try to figure why someone targeted black faculty,” Ogletree said. Still, among students and other Law School affiliates reacting to the incident on Thursday, many condemned it through posts on social media and formal and informal gatherings on campus. Leland S. Shelton, the president of the Harvard Black Law Student Association, described it as “actually one of the most clear-cut, overt instances of very, very vile and disrespectful behavior from somebody”; second-year Law School student Michele D. Hall, who posted photographs of the vandalized portraits in a post on the website Blavity, wrote, “This morning at Harvard Law School we woke up to a hate crime.”

Harvard University police are treating the discovery of strips of tape placed across photographs of black professors outside of a lecture hall as an act of hate, officials from the university said Thursday. In an e-mailed statement, Martha Minow, dean of Harvard Law School, said police are investigating who defaced portraits of black faculty members displayed at Wasserstein Hall. “The Harvard University Police Department is investigating the incident as a hate crime,” she said. “Expressions of hatred are abhorrent, whether they be directed at race, sex, sexual preference, gender identity, religion, or any other targets of bigotry.” A spokesman for the Harvard University Police Department said the incident remains an “open and active investigation.” Images of the marred portraits were shared on Twitter by Jonathan Wall, a third-year law student at the school. Wall said the pictures were sent to him from a classmate earlier that morning. “I was shocked. I was shocked, and I was obviously disgusted. Especially because it seems to be in response to yesterday’s day of activism,” said Wall.

Supreme Court Associate Justice Elena Kagan discussed what she described as “remarkable” changes in interpretation of statutory law in a conversation with law professor John F. Manning ’82 during an event at the Law School on Tuesday. Law School Dean Martha L. Minow introduced Kagan, one of her predecessors as dean. She noted that this lecture series is named after Supreme Court Associate Justice Antonin G. Scalia, whom Minow described as Kagan’s “sparring partner, hunting partner, and friend.” The talk centered on what Minow called the “revolution” in statutory interpretation over the past several decades that has shifted the focus in the courts from common law to statutory law.

Harvard Law School Dean Martha L. Minow defended race-based affirmative action for law school admissions in an amici curiae brief filed for the the upcoming U.S. Supreme Court case Fisher vs. University of Texas at Austin. Minow filed the brief Yale Law School Dean Robert C. Post ’69 last week. Harvard has also submitted an amicus brief for the Fisher case offering similar pro-affirmative action argument...In 32-page brief, which was penned by their counsel, Minow and Post contend that law schools should continue to consider race as a factor in a holistic admissions process and that a ruling to the contrary would have “devastating” educational consequences.

In a visit to Harvard Law School, retired four-star general and former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell shared lessons from his service as a close adviser to three presidents, tips on negotiating with difficult foreign leaders, and his thoughts on strengthening support for families and children in the United States. Powell on Friday took part in the American Secretaries of State Program developed jointly by the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School, the Future of Diplomacy Project at Harvard Kennedy School, and Harvard Business School. Law School Dean Martha Minow introduced the afternoon session, which was moderated by HLS Professor Robert H. Mnookin, HBS Professor James Sebenius, and HKS Professor Nicholas Burns.

Harvard Law School has announced that it will be digitizing its vast collection of U.S. case law and making it available free online. Ravel Law, a commercial research and legal analytics company is partnering with Harvard and funding the substantial cost of converting the collection from print to electronic format. The project is called “Free the Law.”...Harvard’s undertaking is evidence of the electronic format’s predominance and the (relative) ease by which vast resources can be shared to advance the public interest. Talk about pro bono! Dean Martha Minow of Harvard Law School is quoted in The Times piece saying that “Improving access to justice is a priority” and that Harvard feels “an obligation and an opportunity here to open up our resources to the public.” While I suspect Dean Minow would readily concede that access to information is not the panacea for solving the access to justice crisis — affordable access to lawyers is — sharing resources is a great step in the right direction. And her rationale for doing so is laudatory.

Harvard Law School announced today that, with the support of Ravel Law, a legal research and analytics platform, it is digitizing its entire collection of U.S. case law, one of the largest collections of legal materials in the world, and will make the collection available online, for free, to anyone with an Internet connection. The “Free the Law” initiative will provide open, wide-ranging access to American case law for the first time in U.S. history. “Driving this effort is a shared belief that the law should be free and open to all,” said Harvard Law School Dean Martha Minow...“Libraries were founded as an engine for the democratization of knowledge, and the digitization of Harvard Law School’s collection of U.S. case law is a tremendous step forward in making legal information open and easily accessible to the public,” said Jonathan Zittrain, the George Bemis Professor of International Law at Harvard Law School and vice dean for library and information resources.

Shelves of law books are an august symbol of legal practice, and no place, save the Library of Congress, can match the collection at Harvard’s Law School Library. Its trove includes nearly every state, federal, territorial and tribal judicial decision since colonial times — a priceless potential resource for everyone from legal scholars to defense lawyers trying to challenge a criminal conviction. Now, in a digital-age sacrifice intended to serve grand intentions, the Harvard librarians are slicing off the spines of all but the rarest volumes and feeding some 40 million pages through a high-speed scanner. They are taking this once unthinkable step to create a complete, searchable database of American case law that will be offered free on the Internet, allowing instant retrieval of vital records that usually must be paid for...“Improving access to justice is a priority,” said Martha Minow, dean of Harvard Law School, explaining why Harvard has embarked on the project. “We feel an obligation and an opportunity here to open up our resources to the public.”...Under the agreement with Harvard, the entire underlying database, not just limited search results, will be shared with nonprofit organizations and scholars that wish to develop specialized applications. Ravel and Harvard will withhold the database from other commercial groups for eight years. After that, it will be available to anyone for any purpose, said Jonathan L. Zittrain, a Harvard Law professor and director of the law library.

A book review by Martha Minow. This is a courageous and imaginative book by the former Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth (formerly, the British Commonwealth). He develops the notion of "altruistic evil" to refer to violence committed "in a sacred cause, in the name of high ideals," and calls it the biggest threat to freedom in our time. Exploring terrible violence committed in the name of religious beliefs, he argues that a particular mindset ("pathological dualism") is to blame, traces its appearance across otherwise diverging religious traditions, and identifies interpretations of religious narratives giving rise to violence between and among Jewish, Christian, and Muslim believers. Constructively, he draws on interpretive resources within the traditions to point toward solutions.

At a time of substantial change in legal education and the profession—in which the careers of law-school graduates develop in increasingly varied, often global, professional contexts—Harvard Law School (HLS) kicked off its “Campaign for the Third Century” on Friday, October 23, with an afternoon of speeches and panel discussions that hinted at some of these transformations in practice and pedagogy. Later, during a gala evening dinner featuring speeches by Harvard president Drew Faust and HLS dean Martha Minow, campaign co-chair James A. Attwood Jr., J.D.-M.B.A. ’84, announced a campaign goal of $305 million, of which he said $241 million (79 percent) had already been raised in “the silent phase.” Minow announced a campaign-leading $15-million gift from Michael R. Klein, LL.M. ’67; the school will soon add his name to what is now the Berkman Center for Internet and Society.