Martha Minow

...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.”

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

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.

Harvard Law School didn’t comply with federal regulations governing response to sexual harassment at colleges and is taking steps to address the problem, the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights announced Tuesday as it wrapped up its investigation of the school...The complaint was first brought to the Department of Education four years ago, according to a statement sent by Harvard Law Dean Martha Minow to the school community Tuesday...“We are deeply committed to fostering a campus climate that is free of sexual harassment and sexual violence,” Ms. Minow said in the emailed message, adding that the school’s administration will conduct surveys and host discussions about eliminating sexual misconduct.

An op-ed by Martha Minow and Robert Post. In the wake of the recent grand jury decisions in Ferguson and Staten Island, outrage and despair are reverberating across the nation, including at the law schools where we teach. Many of our students are struggling to reconcile their ideals of justice with what they perceive as manifest injustices in the criminal law system. Law establishes its legitimacy through procedures that are open and fair. Legal procedures create accountability for those who wield power. We ought to determine the law’s legitimacy at least in part from the perspective of those who suffer its coercion. When the law’s blows fall persistently on the lives and bodies of identifiable groups, and when the procedures we have designed to create legal accountability are short-circuited or fail, our aspiration for a legitimate social order is put at risk.

Amid the quarterly reports of law firm performance and rankings in various league tables, three vaunted lawyers are calling on firms, in-house counsel and law schools to re-evaluate their priorities and obligations. Ben Heineman Jr., the former general counsel of General Electric Co.; William Lee, a partner at Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale & Dorr LLP; and David Wilkins, a professor at Harvard Law School, have co-written “Lawyers as Professionals and as Citizens: Key Roles and Responsibilities in the 21st Century.” The essay, prompted by a discussion with Harvard Dean Martha Minow, is intended to address the current state of legal practice and education. The three write that there is “widespread agreement that the legal profession is in a period of stress and transition; its economic models are under duress; the concepts of its professional uniqueness are narrow and outdated; and, as a result, its ethical imperatives are weakened and their sources ill-defined.”

Legendary music industry executive Clive Davis described his transformation from Harvard Law School student to president of Columbia Records at a lecture in Wasserstein Hall on Friday afternoon. Answering questions from HLS Dean Martha L. Minow and audience members, Davis talked extensively about his work with Whitney Houston, Dionne Warwick, and other artists before a crowd of several hundred event attendees.

It’s not often that Harvard Law School Dean Martha Minow gets rattled. But then, it’s not every day that Clive Davis, the legendary record label executive, producer, and talent nurturer, stops by Wasserstein Hall to reminisce about his illustrious, six-decade career in the music industry. “I have interviewed Supreme Court justices, I’ve been with presidents of countries, I am so nervous!” Minow told Davis, LL.B. ’56, Friday afternoon as they chatted about Davis’ improbable journey as a poor Jewish kid from Brooklyn who made it to Harvard Law School (HLS) on a scholarship and went on to become one of the most successful and revered figures in music business history.