Article

Lila Fenwick ’56 was a student at Harvard Law School in 1954 when the Supreme Court decision in Brown v.  Board of Education came down. “I was delirious,” recalled Fenwick, one of only a handful of women students at HLS at the time and the only black woman among them.

The Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University is currently taking the lead in the effort to explore the ways data can be mined to increase understanding of COVID-19 and to fight it more efficiently.

For the Clinical Program at Harvard Law School, the past weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic have been a time to mobilize. As the clinics have moved to working remotely, their work has continued with new urgency.

Harvard Law Professor Charles Fried, who served as solicitor general under President Ronald Reagan, joined 21 other conservative or libertarian attorneys in a statement condemning inspector general Michael Atkinson’s ouster as part of a “continuous assault on the rule of law.”

It was 1999 and the dot-com bubble was about to burst. Corporations were scrambling to address new legal challenges online. Napster was testing the music industry. And at Harvard Law School, the Berkman Klein Center was creating a clinical teaching program specializing in cyberlaw.

HLS Professors Glenn Cohen and Andrew Crespo discuss their proposals to protect doctors and hospitals from potential lawsuits and criminal prosecution during the COVID-19 pandemic.

At a March 27 Petrie-Flom event on medical debt and universal health coverage, health experts and journalists raise serious concerns about the affordability of testing and hospital care.

Statistics released by the Social Science Research Network (SSRN) indicate that, as of the beginning of 2020, Harvard Law School faculty members featured prominently on SSRN’s list of the most-cited law professors.

Martha Minow shared her thoughts on the subject of law and forgiveness, a focus of her most recent scholarship at TEDWomen, an annual conference that highlights the contributions and ideas of notable women across a number of fields.

HLS students reflect on their first week of online classes.

Harvard Law School Professor Emily Broad Leib ’08, director of the HLS Food Law and Policy Clinic, and her students have been working furiously to ensure that the most vulnerable—and ultimately the rest of us—are fed during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Catherine Pattanayak ’04 has been appointed Harvard Law School’s assistant dean for public service and director of the Bernard Koteen Office of Public Interest Advising. She was formerly OPIA’s interim assistant dean for public service.

A study by professors Lucian Bebchuk, Alma Cohen, and Allen Ferrell that puts forward a corporate governance index—the Entrenchment Index (E Index)—for assessing the quality of corporate governance in public companies has been applied and used over 1,000 times in empirical analyses as of the end of 2019.

Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, the Harvard Law School J.D. Admissions Office announced last week that the deadline to apply for the School’s Junior Deferral Program has been postponed by two months, and clarified that pass/fail grades in spring 2020 will not harm an applicant’s chances of admission.

In a Q&A, scholars at the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School raise important legal and ethical questions about health care delivery and the enactment of extraordinary public health measures in response to the ongoing epidemic.

Professor Jeannie Suk Gersen discusses switching her classroom to remote learning.

As federal and state governments take measures to curtail public activity during the COVID-19 outbreak, Charles Fried and Nancy Gertner agree that the restriction on individual freedom is largely appropriate for the circumstance.

Harvard’s Animal Law & Policy Program filed its first Supreme Court brief challenging the Trump administration’s waiver of laws regarding the U.S.-Mexico border wall construction. Ashley Maiolatesi ’20 recently corresponded with Harvard Law Today about what is at stake, the specific ramifications of these waivers, and her own personal connection to the project.

This month, Harvard Law Professors Jim Greiner and I. Glenn Cohen teamed up with bioethics scholar Holly Fernandez Lynch to author “Overcoming obstacles to experiments in legal practice,” in which the collaborators argue in favor of randomized studies in legal research over the common practice of relying on the expertise and judgment of individuals.

Noah Feldman and Richard Lazarus ’79 discuss public health and civil liberties in the time of COVID-19 on Feldman's Deep Background podcast.