Martha Minow

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.

Emily Broad Leib '08, cofounder and director of Harvard Law School’s Food Law and Policy Clinic, has been named Assistant Clinical Professor of Law at HLS.

On a windswept, sunny afternoon day on Holmes Field at Harvard Law School, former U.S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords and her spouse, the astronaut Mark Kelly, emphasized the value of public service to the Law School’s Class of 2015....The ceremony also featured several student awards given by Dean of the Law School Martha L. Minow. She honored students for service to the Law School community, including several for their pro bono work as students...Jon D. Hanson, a Law School professor, was also honored at the Class Day ceremony. Hanson spearheaded the Law School’s systemic justice project, which focuses on tackling societal and policy problems with the law. He discussed the events at Ferguson, Staten Island, Cleveland, and Baltimore involving police violence towards black men, and “the chasm between law and justice.”