Martha Minow

Former Massachusetts Governor and Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney spoke about the importance of experience in the private sector, the 2016 presidential campaign, and his time as a student at Harvard Law School during a public question and answer session at the Law School Friday. Law School Dean Martha L. Minow joined Romney on stage and questioned him on topics ranging from modern-day political polarization to finding a work-life balance. She later handed the microphone over to members of the crowd in a packed Milstein East Hall. Romney graduated from the Law School in 1975 and Harvard Business School in 1974.

Campaigning for governor of Massachusetts in 2002, Mitt Romney, J.D./M.B.A. ’75, decided he would spend one day every week doing someone else’s job. He cooked hot dogs at Fenway Park, worked at a day care center, took a turn on a paving crew. One day he hung off the back of a garbage truck making its rounds through the city of Boston. “It was really educational,” Romney said, recalling the experience for a Harvard Law School audience on Friday. “We’d pull up to a corner and there’d be people waiting to cross the street, and I’m not more than two feet from these people. And they don’t see you. You’re invisible. If you’re on a garbage truck, you’re an invisible person. “I thought, wow — we don’t see each other as we ought to in society.” The former Massachusetts governor and Republican presidential nominee, visiting Harvard Law School (HLS) for a Q&A session hosted by Dean Martha Minow, encouraged a renewed civility in politics and society, emphasizing the difference one person can make through serving others.

Describing himself as a 'recovering,' though not yet 'recovered,' lawyer, Richard Tofel ’83, president of the Pulitzer Prize-winning non-profit news organization ProPublica, explored the challenges facing investigative journalism in the digital age at a talk he gave at Harvard Law School on April 3.

Oneida Nation Representative and CEO of Oneida Nation Enterprises Ray Halbritter spoke with Harvard Law School Dean Martha Minow on April 6 about the R-word...Oneida Nation Representative and CEO of Oneida Nation Enterprises Ray Halbritter returned to Harvard Law School—where he earned his J.D. in 1990—on April 6 to talk to students and faculty about racial slurs promulgated by the names of mascots and sports teams in today’s America. The Oneida Nation and the National Congress of American Indians launched the Change the Mascot campaign two years ago to pressure the National Football League’s Washington “Redskins” team to change its name.

In 2009, 40 percent of Harvard Law School’s entering class, according to data provided the school’s Admissions Office, arrived directly from their senior year of college, maybe even still sporting the odd T-shirt from last year’s big rivalry football game. It was the continuation of a years-long trend: From 2005 to 2009, between 39 and 45 percent of each incoming class were just recently undergraduates, with the remainder having spent at least one year working or studying elsewhere. But the next year, in 2010, the young students matriculating straight from undergrad only constituted 28 percent of the entering Law School class. More than two-thirds had post-graduate experience...“When I became dean, I directed our admissions team to give extra weight to applicants with experience since college,” [Martha] Minow wrote in an email. Now, since after 2009, roughly three-fourths of each incoming class of Harvard Law students comes to campus having spent some time beyond their college campuses. It’s a change Minow and Jessica L. Soban ’02, chief admissions officer at the Law School, broadcast as a way to enhance the Harvard Law School experience for students, allowing them to cultivate a better sense of their interests and bring a more experienced perspective to the classroom.

The Harvard Food Law Society and the Food Literacy Project hosted the “Just Food? Forum on Justice in the Food System” at Harvard Law School recently. Margiana Petersen-Rockney, director of the Food Literacy Project, and Alexandra Jordan, a second-year student at HLS, organized the forum under Harvard’s yearlong Food Better initiative, which was created to discuss issues surrounding what we eat...“Justice requires that there be a possible vision of food quality and availability,” said HLS Dean Martha Minow, who is also the Morgan and Helen Chu Professor of Law, in her welcoming address. “We are all here because we want to see a more inclusive food movement. We are all consumers, we all have a say, and we challenge you to be an active participant.”

Dean of Harvard Law School Martha L. Minow has appointed a Title IX committee to begin implementing the school’s new set of procedures for responding to cases of alleged sexual harassment, according to Law School spokesperson Robb London...After a group of 28 professors published an open letter in the Boston Globe that criticized Harvard’s policy in October, Minow appointed a committee, chaired by Law School professor John Coates, to draft a new set of school-specific procedures.

A conference focusing on interdisciplinary examination of justice in the food system drew hundreds to Harvard Law School’s Wasserstein Hall this weekend for “Just Food?,” a joint project between the Harvard Food law Society and Harvard’s Food Literacy Project. Featuring guest speakers, workshops, panels, movie screenings, and exhibits, the conference solicited over 500 registrations. Several notable guests spoke at the conference, including Law School Dean Martha L. Minow, who delivered a welcome address. Ricardo Salvador, director of the Food and Environment Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, was originally scheduled to deliver a keynote talk on Sunday but was unable to attend, according to conference organizers...Margiana R. Petersen-Rockney, the Food Literacy Project coordinator, and Alexandra M. Jordan, a second-year Law School student and president of the Harvard Food Law Society, organized the two-day conference under the Food Better campaign, an initiative launched by the Deans’ Food System Challenge “to raise awareness about food systems issues,” according to its website.

...The killings of unarmed black men by white police officers last summer — the fatal shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., and the chokehold death of Eric Garner, captured on video, in Staten Island, N.Y. — and the grand jury decisions against indictments in those cases sparked shock and outrage that led to massive protests across the country, including here at Harvard. ... At Harvard Law School (HLS), that question has been felt acutely, prompting an array of personal and public efforts, including panels, talks, conferences, seminars, in-class discussions, and faculty opinion pieces in recent months. In December, Dean Martha Minow convened a School-wide meeting for students, faculty, and staff to discuss the grand jury decisions. “The nation has witnessed lethal violence against unarmed individuals who are members of visible minorities, and there is a widespread perception that procedures meant to secure legal accountability aren’t working,” Minow told the Gazette in a statement last month about why these incidents have resonated so deeply at HLS. “The ideal of equal justice under law animates our law school and informs our daily work. Many of us here feel a special responsibility to push for change.”

One hundred years ago, in the first two months of 1915, what was then called the Great War — puzzled over by experts gathered at a Harvard conference on Friday ― established its most enduring historical signatures...Moderated by Dean Martha Minow of the Law School, the title of the first panel, “The Transnational Theater of War,” was a reminder, Minow said, of the unprecedented global nature of the conflict. ..In the same panel, Samuel Moyn, a Harvard professor of law and history, was to talk about “Aggression and Atrocity: From the Great War to the Forever War.”

Clincial Professor Susan Crawford. Susan Crawford has been appointed clinical professor of law at Harvard Law School. She had been the John A. Reilly…

Poor and middle-class litigants in Florida are increasingly showing up to court without lawyers, resulting in a significant access-to-justice problem throughout the state. That was the consensus of a panel on "The Importance of Access to Justice to the Judiciary" held Friday at the University of Miami School of Law. The panel was part of a Legal Services Corp. half-day seminar. Panelists included Florida Supreme Court Chief Justice Jorge Labarga; U.S. District Judge Marcia Cooke in Miami; Richard Leefe of Leefe, Gibbs, Sullivan & Dupre in Louisiana; Puerto Rico Supreme Court Chief Justice Liana Fiol Matta; and William Van Norwick Jr., a retired judge from Florida's First District Court of Appeal. The panel was moderated by Harvard law dean Martha Minow.