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stress and transition; its economic models are under duress; the concepts of its professional uniqueness are narrow and outdated; and, as a result, its ethical imperatives are weakened and their sources ill-defined.”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.

The legalization of same-sex marriage in many states was a titanic step forward for the LGBT community, but the community still faces a number of challenges in gaining full equality, according to Mary Bonauto, a leading lawyer in the field...Bonauto spoke Tuesday at a brown-bag luncheon at Harvard Law School (HLS), during which she was interviewed by Dean Martha Minow and fielded questions from students in the audience.

An op-ed by Martha Minow. Neglected in today’s headlines, blogs, and talk radio is a silent, shameful crisis that inflicts suffering and costs the nation money, legitimacy, and decency. Our justice system has become inaccessible to millions of poor people and so every day, we violate the “equal justice under law” motto engraved on the front of the grand United States Supreme Court. Americans who cannot afford legal help routinely forfeit basic rights as a result. Because the law does not enforce itself, veterans seeking benefits the nation has guaranteed, victims of domestic violence needing legal protection, and tenants and homeowners pursuing their rights since the financial disaster all need advisors and guides through the law and its agencies and courts.

According to a new report issued by the Boston Bar Association’s Statewide Task Force to Expand Civil Legal Aid in Massachusetts, 64 percent of the low income people in Massachusetts who applied for and were qualified for civil legal assistance were turned away over the past year because the funding was not there to support the representation. In total, an estimated 30,000 were denied legal services in cases having to do with such things as child custody, foreclosures, and employment violations. Martha Minow is the dean of the Harvard Law School and one of the 32 members of the task force that produced the 37-page report. “When you have people who are literally not represented in actions where they can lose their homes or face physical violence, where they can’t get legal remedies to which they’re entitled, there’s a failure to live up to the rule of law,” said Minow.