Teaching & Learning

At Harvard Law School on Aug. 27, Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court and former Harvard Law School Dean Elena Kagan ’86 sat down for a conversation with John Manning ’85, dean and Morgan and Helen Chu Dean and Professor of Law at Harvard Law School.

Clinical education at HLS: Four experiences

With the Supreme Court divided ideologically along partisan lines for the first time in history, the Solicitor General—no matter the administration—has become more political. How did this post, long regarded as the keel keeping the government balanced, come to contribute to forceful tacks one way or the other, to the Court’s seeming indifference?

Mary E. Klotman M.D., dean of Duke University School of Medicine and vice chancellor for health affairs, recently sat down with Professor David B. Wilkins, faculty director of the Center on the Legal Profession, for a conversation on how medicine has changed over time, particularly with respect to the development of professional roles within it.

Kristi Jobson ’12 has been appointed Harvard Law School’s assistant dean for admissions and chief admissions officer. Jobson comes to HLS from Ropes & Gray, where she litigated shareholder actions and complex commercial disputes while maintaining an active pro bono practice, with a particular emphasis on issues affecting the LGBTQ+ community.

The Harvard Law School Library hosted a series of book talks by HLS authors, with topics including Authoritarianism in America, the Supreme Court of India, and Legal Reasoning and Political Conflict. As part of this ongoing series, faculty authors from various disciplines shared their research and discussed their recently published books with a panel of colleagues and the Harvard Law community.

This spring, Professors Jody Freeman, Alex Whiting, Carol Steiker and Paul Butler each shared personal stories and experiences with a group of soon-to-be graduates poised to enter the new phase of Life After HLS as part of the Last Lecture Series, an event sponsored annually by the 3L and LL.M. Class Marshals.

As part of a cooperative agreement between the two schools, Harvard Law Professors Glenn Cohen, Holger Spamann, and Lucie White traveled to France in June to teach at the eighth annual Intensive Doctoral Week (IDW) at the law school of the Institut d’Études Politiques de Paris, more commonly known as “Sciences Po.”

Last month, the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University announced the incoming and returning fellows, faculty associates, and affiliates who together will form the core of the Center’s networked community in the 2018-2019 academic year.

In July, Harvard’s Labor and Worklife Program began an ambitious effort to fix a broken system of labor laws. The program, with the overall title “Rebalancing Economic and Political Power: A Clean Slate for the Future of Labor Law,” began with a daylong seminar at Wasserstein Hall last month.

At awards ceremonies this spring, more than a dozen Harvard Law School staff were recognized for their outstanding contributions to the Harvard community.

This year marks the fifth that Harvard has been a host of the summertime program known as the Warrior-Scholar Project, an academic boot camp intended to help provide members of the armed forces or those recently discharged with the skills and confidence to transition to top-tier colleges.

Members of Harvard Law School’s S.J.D. community gathered on campus for the 2018 S.J.D. Association Workshop, “Between Law and Justice: Ethics, Politics, and the State,” on May 17. The Doctor of Juridical Science (S.J.D.) is Harvard Law School’s most advanced law degree, designed principally for aspiring legal academics who wish to pursue sustained independent study, research, and writing.

Susannah Barton Tobin ‘04, managing director of the Climenko Fellowship Program and assistant dean for academic career advising at Harvard Law School, has been appointed the Ezra Ripley Thayer Senior Lecturer on Law at HLS.

For six months, Harvard Law School students and alumni worked with legal professionals to create strategies promoting diversity in the legal workplace; those ideas were unveiled at Diversity Lab's Diversity in Law Hackathon, co-sponsored by Harvard Law School Executive Education and Bloomberg Law.

U.S. Circuit Court Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh, who has taught courses at Harvard Law School each year since 2008, has been nominated by President Donald J. Trump to fill the Supreme Court seat being vacated by Associate Justice Anthony M. Kennedy ’61.

Associate Justice Anthony M. Kennedy ’61 announced today that he will retire from the Supreme Court, on which he has served since 1988.

Researchers at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society are collaborating with MIT scholars to study driverless cars, social media feeds, and criminal justice algorithms, to make sure openness and ethics inform artificial intelligence.

During his nearly 10 years on the Harvard Law faculty, Holger Spamann S.J.D. ’09 has always enjoyed teaching corporate finance, but he’s also found it challenging. Some students have worked as traders at hedge funds or in private equity and others have been newly minted English majors who haven’t thought much about business concepts. The solution he has been exploring this year is a corporate finance course divided into four different modules, any of which students can opt out of depending on their knowledge level.

At an event at Harvard Law School honoring Lani Guinier earlier this year, Susan Sturm invoked a phrase that was familiar to most of the attendees, a mix of Guinier’s family, colleagues, collaborators, friends and students. It was a line that Guinier often used when prodding her students into pushing harder and thinking deeper: “My problem is, if you stop there … ”