Martha Minow

THE FIRST PERSON President Donald Trump pardoned, in August 2017, was Sheriff Joe Arpaio. He was infamous for being brutal to undocumented immigrants and others in his shameful jails, and cheered on by neo-Nazis. The month before, a federal judge had found Arpaio guilty of criminal contempt, which carried a jail sentence of up to six months, for “flagrant disregard” of a court order. He had refused to stop harassing and arresting Latinos without any basis for suspicion that they had committed a crime. In the 2016 elections, Arpaio lost his race for a seventh term in Maricopa County, Arizona, apparently because the county no longer wanted a sheriff who engaged in what the Justice Department called “unconstitutional policing.” But in the presidential election, Arpaio helped push the county and the state for Trump, who advanced his own anti-immigrant crusade by saying Arpaio was in legal trouble for doing his job—rounding up people who were in America illegally. In When Should Law Forgive?, 300th Anniversary University Professor and former Harvard Law School dean Martha Minow reckons with a list of ways the pardon was wrong: it rewarded a crucial campaign supporter; it signaled to current and former Trump aides that they should refuse to testify against the president—and, if they were convicted, the president would pardon them, too; it went to a man known for his racist ranting and haughty defiance of law; and it reveled in that defiance. As a result, Minow emphasized, that pardon was and “is a direct invitation for disobedience.” Appalling as Arpaio’s contempt was, Trump’s was even worse as an abuse of constitutional authority: “to pardon a law enforcement official who so thoroughly disdained the law is to excuse or honor that attitude of disrespect for law and for the courts.” Minow’s book is full of similarly sharp answers to the hard question of its title.

In a new book, a former dean of Harvard Law School, Martha Minow, opens with this observation on today’s society: “Ours is an unforgiving age, an age of resentment. The supply of forgiveness is deficient.” She wrote the book – “When Should Law Forgive?” – because of what she sees as the limits of the law in dealing with the worst of crimes, such as murder, as well as the difficulty in forgiving crimes “that defy conception.” The book is well timed. On Wednesday in a Dallas County courthouse, a TV camera caught yet another public example of a unilateral act of personal forgiveness to an individual who had committed a heinous crime.

When Brandt Jean hugged the white police officer who had just been convicted of murdering his unarmed brother while he was in his own home, the act sparked a wider conversation about forgiveness, the law, and race in America. And while some saw officer Amber Guyger’s 10-year prison sentence as a fair outcome, others said it was too light a punishment, and pointed to many ways in which the American criminal justice system has systematically incarcerated people of color at high rates and with long sentences. In her new book, "When Should Law Forgive?", Harvard Law School professor Martha Minow examines a range of areas where the legal system offers opportunities for absolution, and asks where they might be used more, and where they should not. Jim Braude was joined by Martha Minow.

When should law forgive? That's a question that Martha Minow, a professor at Harvard and the former dean of Harvard Law School, has been wrestling with for years. Now, it's the title and the question at the heart of her new book.

Newspaper publisher Conrad Black, who disagrees with just about everything she does and believes, says, “she would get my vote as an ecumenical saint.” Alan Dershowitz, who disagrees with only most of what she does and believes, says he would “trade her for two American Supreme Court justices and a draft choice to be named later.” Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who probably agrees with her on just about everything, says she is “proud to count her among dearest sisters-in-law.”...Martha Minow, onetime dean of Harvard Law School, calls her work “pathbreaking.

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Former University President Drew G. Faust has been named a University Professor, the highest honor a Harvard faculty member can receive, the University announced Monday. Faust joins 24 prominent Harvard faculty with the distinction—including University President Lawrence S. Summers, former Harvard Law School Dean Martha L. Minow, and MacArthur “Genius” Grant recipient Henry Louis Gates Jr.

An op-ed by Martha Minow. Why are leading educators, lawyers, and scholars filing briefs this week asking the US Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit to listen to children in the Detroit public schools? A district court declined to proceed with the school children’s complaint that the Detroit public schools deprive students — 97 percent of whom are students of color — of any real chance for basic literacy while also exposing them to unsanitary and unsafe conditions. The school system has the lowest literacy rate of any major school district in the nation, a shortage of qualified teachers, and teaching materials that are both out-of-date and too few to serve the students. The schools do not even offer a core curriculum. Instead, the schools are infested with rodents and other pests. Extreme temperatures require early-bird dismissals and school closings.

Roughly two dozen Harvard Law School professors have signed a New York Times editorial arguing that the United States Senate should not confirm Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court. Harvard affiliates — including former Law School Dean Martha L. Minow and Laurence Tribe — joined more than 1,000 law professors across the country in signing the editorial, published online Wednesday. The professors wrote that Kavanaugh displayed a lack of “impartiality and judicial temperament requisite to sit on the highest court of our land” in the heated testimony he gave during a nationally televised hearing held Sept. 27 in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee....As of late Wednesday, the letter had been signed by the following: Sabi Ardalan, Christopher T. Bavitz, Elizabeth Bartholet, Christine Desan, Susan H. Farbstein, Nancy Gertner, Robert Greenwald, Michael Gregory, Janet Halley, Jon Hanson, Adriaan Lanni, Bruce H. Mann, Frank Michelman, Martha Minow, Robert H. Mnookin, Intisar Rabb, Daphna Renan, David L. Shapiro, Joseph William Singer, Carol S. Steiker, Matthew C. Stephenson, Laurence Tribe, Lucie White, Alex Whiting, Jonathan Zittrain

...This week, the Kavanaugh matter is a stark symbol of a social and cultural issue that roiled the country and created the #MeToo movement long before the nominee’s name was known outside legal circles...‘’Turning the Supreme Court into an instrument of polarized politics,’’ Martha Minow, the former dean of the Harvard Law School and now the occupant of a prestigious endowed chair there, said in an interview, ‘’is bad for the country, bad for the rule of law and bad for everyone.’’...‘’The political and the personal have become entwined precisely at the nexus of the #MeToo movement with issues like sex equality in the workplace and in matters of reproduction and abortion,’’ said Laurence Tribe, a onetime Supreme Court clerk who is a prominent Harvard Law expert in constitutional law. The result, he said, was ‘’the first occasion in our history in which the long-term legal stakes of a particular nominee’s confirmation and the issues of character and attitude presented by an explosive personal accusation profoundly overlap.’’

With the rise of the internet, national and local news organizations alike are struggling. Budget cuts and shrinking staffs are all too common. Martha Minow, a human rights expert and Harvard Law School professor, took on these and other changes in the media landscape at a public lecture at Smith College, Monday, “Freedom of the Press and the Changing Ecosystem of News.” The talk marked Constitution Day, the anniversary of the signing of the U.S. Constitution in 1787.