Martha Minow

Law and documentary film may seem far apart, but they actually share many connections. Documentary filmmakers confront legal questions about privacy, secrecy, access to public and private spaces, and ownership of images and other materials. With the guidance of filmmaker and producer Joseph Tovares and support from the Hewlett Foundation, 12 Harvard Law School students from eight countries have worked since January on the Legal Lens project, producing the five short films hosted here.

In her new book, “When Should Law Forgive?,” the lawyer and academic Martha Minow looks at several areas where she believes American society has become too punitive and offers ways to fix them. Minow is interested in why some societies have found it easier than others to grant forgiveness to wrongdoers; she is also captivated by how and why certain societies have been able to put into place policies that minimize crime and misbehavior, which in turn help us understand that bad behavior is the result of more than individual choice. As she writes, “Child soldiers and other adolescents accused of criminal law violations may not be entirely innocent, but neither are they responsible for the social conditions in which they make their choices. The same can be said of individuals who are drowning in consumer debt or student loans, and even of sovereign nations, cities, and states in debt. Each is to blame when they violate promises to pay back loans or laws against violence, but each also is embedded in larger social patterns that construct limited and often poor options.”

An op-ed by Martha Minow: Public knowledge about law is vital in the same way that public engagement with politics and society matters. Liberty and democracy depend on informed and motivated communities. Yet crucial questions involving law are too often inaccessible to nonlawyers. Lawyers tend to spend little time educating anyone other than their clients, or other lawyers when they act as judges and administrators. Lawyers also deploy technical words and seldom know how to produce the visual media so effective in shaping public knowledge. For these reasons, I decided to offer a course on documentary filmmaking for students at Harvard Law School. Law and documentary film may seem far apart, but they actually share many connections. Documentary filmmakers confront legal questions about privacy, secrecy, access to public and private spaces, and ownership of images and other materials. Lawyers increasingly use video interviews and computer-generated graphics in hearings and negotiations. Mass media culture informs views of legal decision-makers and everyone’s pictures of courts and law.

The American justice system’s approach to crime seems to be: Lock up as many people as possible. This is one of many reasons why we’re the most incarcerated country in the world. Punishment has a role in any criminal justice process, but what if it was balanced with a desire to forgive? What if, instead of locking up as many people as possible, we prioritized letting go of grievances in order to create a better future for victims and perpetrators? ... A new book by Harvard law professor Martha Minow, titled When Should Law Forgive?, explores how the restorative justice philosophy might be scaled up and applied to the broader criminal justice system. Minow was dean of Harvard Law from 2009 to 2017 and is known for her work on constitutional law and human rights, especially the rights of racial and religious minorities... I spoke to Minow about what that change might look like, whether it’s compatible with the American philosophy of justice, and why some people have reservations about abandoning the status quo.

Dehlia Umunna remembered seeing the fear. “His eyes were dark,” Umunna recalled. “And he was close to tears. And he looked at me and said, ‘Will I be going to jail and will I be going to jail for a very long time?’” “He was shaking,” she said. “I looked over at his mom and his mom was shaking. She was nervous. She was holding the hands of her 13-year-old boy.” Umunna, a clinical professor of law at Harvard Law School and deputy director of the Criminal Justice Institute, subsequently learned that the boy, who suffered from bipolar disorder and ADHD, had been surreptitiously videotaped playing video games in his living room wearing only his underwear. By the time he arrived at school the next day, the video had been posted online, where it had been seen by 300 of his peers, who proceeded to tease him. Frustrated and angry, he was heard to say, “I understand why the Parkland shooter did what he did.” ...“And as I looked over the case, I said to myself, this is exactly what [Prof.] Martha [Minow]’s book talks about,” she recalled. “This is a prime example of where we should nudge the courts and the decision-makers to exercise forgiveness.”...Umunna’s comments came during a panel discussion of “When Should Law Forgive?”, a new book by Martha Minow, 300th Anniversary University Professor and former dean of HLS. The book explores the complicated intersection of the law, justice, and forgiveness, asking whether the law should encourage people to forgive, and when courts, public officials, and specific laws should forgive. In addition to Umunna and Minow, panelists included Carol Steiker ’86, the Henry J. Friendly Professor of Law and co-director of the Criminal Justice Policy Program; Toby Merrill ’11, an HLS lecturer on law and director of the Project on Predatory Student Lending; and Homi K. Bhabha

An op-ed by Martha Minow: Last month, after Dallas police officer Amber Guyger was sentenced to 10 years in the murder of Botham Jean, the victim’s brother, Brandt Jean, walked across the courtroom, hugged Guyger, and said, “I forgive you.” I joined others around the country, watching in awe at that act of grace. But I also worried. I worried that black people, like Jean, are expected to forgive in ways others are not. Maybe Guyger, a white police officer, received a lesser sentence than others convicted of murder. And yet I also worry that law itself is so severely weighted toward punishment that it is part of the problem. Legal officials fail to exercise tools of forgiveness built right into the law — and as a result, I worry the rest of us replicate societal inequalities, undermining justice and decency. Forgiveness — letting go of justified grievances — is supported by every religious and philosophical tradition, as well as by numerous health studies. Forgiving those who wronged us can actually improve our health. As President Nelson Mandela, who led South Africa’s transition from Apartheid to a democracy, once said, “Resentment is like drinking poison and hoping it will kill your enemies.”

After two years of struggling to pass any of his community college classes, Jamarria Hall, 19, knows this for certain: His high school did not prepare him. The four years he spent at Detroit’s Osborn High School were “a big waste of time,” he said, recalling 11th and 12th grade English classes where students were taught from materials labeled for third or fourth graders, and where long-term substitutes showed movies instead of teaching. What’s less certain, however, is whether Hall's education in Detroit’s long-troubled school district was so awful, so insufficient, that it violated his constitutional rights. That’s the question now before a federal appeals court that heard arguments last week in one of two cases that experts say could have sweeping implications for schools across the country...Martha Minow, a former dean of Harvard law school and the author of a book about the legacy of the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision, said the education system in Michigan violates the Constitution because some school districts in the state fail to provide even a minimal education while others, including those in affluent suburbs of Detroit, are providing a much higher quality education. “Some people are getting an education and other people are not, and that’s discrimination,” said Minow, who filed an amicus brief on behalf of the Detroit students.

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.

1L January Experiential Term courses focus on skills-building, collaboration and self-reflection

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.