Martha Minow

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.

Harvard Law School raised $241 million of its $305 million of its goal during the quiet phase of its capital campaign, which launched with fanfare on Friday evening. Titled the “Campaign for the Third Century,” the fundraising effort will focus on clinical education and financial aid for students. The Law School recently finished a capital campaign in 2008, when it raised $476 million, surpassing its $400 million goal. Because of the proximity to its last fundraising drive, the Law School is the last of Harvard’s schools to launch its part of the University-wide Harvard Campaign, which kicked off publicly in 2013 and seeks to raise $6.5 billion.    

Without mincing words, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy disparaged the American criminal justice system on Thursday for the three prison scourges of long sentences, solitary confinement, and overcrowding. “It’s an ongoing injustice of great proportions,” said Kennedy during a conversation with Harvard Law School (HLS) Dean Martha Minow at Wasserstein Hall, in a room packed mostly with students...Kennedy, LL.B. ’61, whose views on the court reflect a preoccupation with liberty and dignity, has often been described as the high court’s swing vote on major issues. But during his talk with Minow, he said he hated to be depicted that way. “Cases swing. I don’t,” he quipped, as the room erupted in laughter.

In an hour long question and answer session at Harvard Law School on Thursday, United States Supreme Court Justice Anthony M. Kennedy discussed a breadth of topics ranging from his time on the Court, concepts of dignity and freedom, and his own time as a student at the Law School...Dean of the Law School Martha L. Minow, who moderated the discussion, eventually opened up the event to questions from members of the packed crowd in Milstein Hall; Kennedy answered questions on campaign finance laws and recommended reading material, including Franz Kafka’s “The Trial.” When Minow asked him what he had learned as a Law School student, Kennedy again turned to humor to describe his studious days as a student. “I remember a lot of the cases I had in Law School better than cases I’ve worked with,” Kennedy said to laughs.

U.S. Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus highlighted his efforts to reduce the incidence of sexual assault in the military to students, government officials, and veterans gathered to hear him speak at Harvard Law School on Thursday...Dean of the Law School Martha L. Minow praised Mabus and the Disabled American Veterans group for their efforts in helping veterans across the country and for their participation in events like Thursday’s. “Their commitment to raising awareness about the needs of veterans inspires us all,” Minow said.

When Harvard Law School publicly launches its capital campaign on Friday, kicking off an effort that aims to raise several hundred million dollars, it will continue a years-long attempt to rebrand itself. Instead of evoking the halcyon days of the donors’ student experiences as a way to entice them to open their wallets, according to Steven Oliveira, dean of development and alumni relations, the Law School will share another message: The school is very different now...The launch will also showcase the work of professors in new disciplines of law that may not have even existed when some of the donors were students. At a 90-minute panel discussion titled “HLS Thinks Big,” Law School Dean Martha L. Minow will moderate a panel of experts from fields like bioethics and internet law. I. Glenn Cohen, one of the professors who will speak on Friday, wrote in an email that he will discuss bioethics and health law. “As part of the campaign I do whatever I can to connect with alumni interested in these areas (health law, bioethics, food and drug law, biotechnology) and explain why this is such an exciting time for our students and our law school to be involved in these issues,” Cohen wrote.