Teaching & Learning

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Harvard University and Harvard Law School will shift to remote teaching and learning on March 23 as part of efforts to limit the spread of the coronavirus in the community while continuing to educate its students. Matt Gruber, Harvard Law School dean for administration, discusses the “unprecedented move to deal with unprecedented circumstances.”

The Harvard Law School Human Rights Program welcomed government officials, medical experts, legal scholars, and human rights activists from around the world to Cambridge on Feb. 28 for a global consultation on practices of so-called “conversion therapy” to which lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and gender diverse persons are subjected around the world.

Patients are often subjected to nonconsensual procedures and other mistreatment during the birthing process; Alexa Richardson, a student fellow at the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology and Bioethics at Harvard Law School, is working to bring this situation to light.

A report published by HLS' Veterans Legal Clinic finds that inadequate training at VA puts more than 400,000 veterans at risk of being unlawfully turned away from treatment for service-related mental health conditions.

Kendra Albert ’16, former student and current clinical instructor in Berkman Klein Center's Cyberlaw Clinic talks about their takeaways from that experience, their current work, and what they’re the proudest of in their time there.

Harvard Law School has launched a new Religious Freedom Clinic. The clinic joins the 46 legal clinics and student practice organizations that make up the school’s clinical program.

Two professors squared off Friday during the inaugural Harvard Law School Rappaport Forum in a session titled “When Is Speech Violence? And Other Questions About Campus Speech.”

Amid rising rates of diabetes and obesity in the nation, the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School recently hosted a panel discussion concerning levies—those enacted, those proposed and those failed—on sugary beverages in jurisdictions nationwide.

“Just Mercy,” the film based on the memoir by Bryan Stevenson ’85, ends with a sobering statistic: For every nine people executed in the U.S., one on death row is exonerated. As Professor Carol Steiker noted in a discussion following a screening of the film, that makes the U.S. No. 1 in a problematic category.

Harvard Law Today recently sat down with Ed Moloy, the library’s curator of modern manuscripts, and Project Archivist Irene Gates to discuss the Antonin Scalia Collection, the work of archiving, preserving, and making it public, and other collections held by the Harvard Law Library.

With headlines declaring 2019 the year that the world woke up to climate change, Aminta Ossom ’09 sees hope in approaching the issue from a specific angle: human rights.

Eloise Lawrence, a community lawyering advocate, was named assistant clinical professor of law at Harvard Law School and deputy faculty director of the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau.