Teaching & Learning

Students from the incoming classes of J.D.s and LL.M.s talk about what inspired them to pursue a legal education.

Faculty and staff kick off Orientation 2020 with a big welcome to incoming students.

As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to rage across the globe, affecting every aspect of human society, Harvard Law School finds itself at a pivotal moment in legal education. From the crisis, and the challenges and opportunities of remote learning, it is wresting pedagogical innovations that are transforming what it means to get a legal education.

Mark Tushnet is the rare scholar who has been able to connect disparate fields and ways of thinking about law and constitutional government as few other scholars have been willing or able to do.

As William Alford completes his tenure, Mark Wu assumes vice deanship of the Graduate Program and International Legal Studies at HLS.

After 18 years as its faculty director, Professor William P. Alford ’77 completed his tenure as vice dean for the Graduate Program and International Legal Studies at Harvard Law School on June 30.

Since going remote in March, the Harvard Law School Library has reimagined what it means to provide services to the HLS community.

Katherine Meyer, director of the Harvard Animal Law & Policy Clinic, corresponded with Harvard Law Today about the clinic's recent Supreme Court amicus brief filing in a Freedom of Information Act case brought by the Sierra Club, concerning access to information regarding the adverse impacts of federal actions on endangered and threatened species.

On August 3, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit vacated a trial court judgment that had been entered in favor of Bolivia’s former president, Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada, and former defense minister, José Carlos Sánchez Berzaín, for the massacre of unarmed Indigenous people in 2003.

Harvard Law School’s International Human Rights Clinic and the University Network for Human Rights released a report Monday documenting widespread human rights abuses carried out under Bolivia’s interim president since she assumed power in November 2019.

Looking for something to add to your summer book list? HLS faculty share what they’re reading.

Shirley Bayle, who turns 100 today, looks back at her life in the law.

PLAP students secure release of two prisoners with mental disabilities, and set new judicial precedent under the Americans with Disabilities Act

Teaching and learning at Harvard Law School in the first months of the pandemic

In the wake of the killing of George Floyd, legal scholars see a moment of reckoning.

No one in legal academia has ever combined the roles of constitutional teacher, scholar, advocate, adviser, and commentator with the dazzling breadth, depth, and eloquence of Larry Tribe ’66. And no constitutional law professor has ever so seamlessly integrated all these roles for his students’ benefit.

It is one thing to find someone who combines stunning intellect, subject matter mastery, confidence and courage in his or her decision-making, but it is exceedingly rare to find one who possesses all those qualities together with a thoroughly genuine humbleness of spirit. But that is Robert Clark.

Mary Ann Glendon communicated an ideal that as students of the law, we were participants in a vast, complex and immensely important human enterprise. [Yet] She never lost sight, with clear-eyed realism, of law as a sociological fact—subject to interests and powers—and of the fragility and flaws of every human undertaking.

In a July 2019 Q&A, David Harris, managing director of the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race & Justice, discussed the annual public reading of Douglass’ speech “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?”, virtual this year for the first time in its 12-year history.

Beatrice Lindstrom, clinical instructor and supervising attorney in the International Human Rights Clinic, has been working for nearly a decade to secure accountability from the U.N. for a devastating cholera outbreak caused by UN peacekeepers in Haiti in 2010.

In an open letter to the community, Harvard Law School professors and other associates condemn President Trump’s statements about recent protests