Martha Minow

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.

The celebration inside the W.E.B. Du Bois Medal ceremony was tempered by some harsh truths: The fight for African-American equality is not over, there is more work to be done, and everyone is implicated. On the heels of a bruising year that saw the deaths of Freddie Gray and Sandra Bland while in police custody, and the mass killings at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C., the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research on Wednesday afternoon honored seven luminaries whose pivotal social and cultural contributions follow in Du Bois’ footsteps and “represent both the triumphs of the work that has been done and the vastness of the work that needs to be done,” said Harvard’s Henry Louis Gates Jr. in his opening remarks...In presenting the medal to [Eric] Holder, Harvard Law School Dean Martha Minow said his “priorities as attorney general showed a man committed to transformative change and the work that it entails: defending the president’s health care reform, advocating for equal marriage, espousing immigration reform, commitment to changing the criminal-justice system, and fervently opposing the recent and ugly chipping away of voting rights.”

John McGinnis has an excellent post over at Library of Law and Liberty... highlighting the rigid liberal orthodoxy of the Association of American Law Schools (AALS). AALS has just sent around the notice of its 2016 annual meeting, highlighting its “Speakers of Note.” As Prof. McGinnis points out: “Of the thirteen announced, none is associated predominantly with Republican party, but eleven are associated with the Democratic Party. Many are prominent liberals. None is a conservative or libertarian.” McGinnis argues that the conference would profit from including some other perspectives. As it happens, one of the 13 “Speakers of Note,” Martha Minow, the dean of Harvard Law School, has written eloquently about the importance of intellectual diversity in the legal academy.

Prominent Islamic scholar Shahab Ahmed, originally from Pakistan, was laid to rest last Saturday morning at the Mt Auburn cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts, his adopted home...“Shahab was one of a kind, and we will be learning from his work for years to come”, said Martha Minow, a professor at Harvard Law School who was among the dozens of prominent scholars and students at the funeral.

When it comes to federal taxes, there is a fundamental reason we should protect religious organizations — even those we disagree with. Functionally, the federal tax exemption is akin to a public forum: a government-provided resource that welcomes and encourages a diversity of viewpoints...As Harvard Law School dean Martha Minow writes, [Robert] Cover critiqued “the power and practice of a government that rules by displacing, suppressing, or exterminating values that run counter to its own...Minow notes that Cover recognized that in a pluralistic society, some norms would “be at odds with his own notions of human equality and liberty.”

(Registration required) Whether the State Bar of California’s plan to require new attorneys to complete at least 15-credits of practical skills courses in law school is unduly restrictive or a needed step to ensure they have some real-world competencies depends on whom you ask—even within the same organization. The Association of American Law Schools is split over the bar’s proposal, with a coalition of law school deans in opposition and a group of clinical professors in favor. …The AALS Deans Steering Committee declined to retract its statement in opposition, according to an Aug. 5 letter from chairwoman and Harvard Law School Dean Martha Minow (left), and chair-elect and Northwestern University School of Law Dean Daniel Rodriguez. While the final version of the proposal represented an improvement over the initial draft, the group’s central concerns remain, they wrote.

As any civil practitioner can attest, the number of people who show up in court without an attorney seems to increase every year. But what’s driving the surge in pro se litigants? How do those trend lines compare in different jurisdictions? And, more broadly, what can be done to improve access to justice? Those were just a few of the questions posed by Harvard Law School Dean Martha Minow at the quarterly meeting of Legal Services Corporation at the University of St. Thomas law school in Minneapolis last Friday. As it turns out, the precise incidence of pro se cases is surprisingly difficult to quantify. But Minow’s panelists — four state supreme court justices from the upper Midwest and one U.S. District Court judge — agreed on one point: The shortage of pro bono lawyers is most pronounced in family law.