Teaching & Learning

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 … ”

On the HLS campus this past fall, eminent friends, students, and colleagues gathered to celebrate a man the world knows as a leading force for racial equality and social justice, and the Harvard community knows affectionately as Tree.

Summer reading: From a queer critical legal studies approach to law reform, to a memoir about growing up bi-racial, to a biography of Chief Justice Marshall.

More than 100 years after students started the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau, there are now 40 clinics and Student Practice Organizations at HLS, focused on everything from cyberlaw to veterans’ rights.

The Harvard Association for Law and Business (HALB) hosted Bill Ackman, founder and chief executive officer of Pershing Square Capital Management, to discuss his views on the current state of activist investing, his experience managing a multibillion dollar fund, and the impact of shareholder activism on corporate governance.

Harvard Law School is pleased to announce that the Fisher family has made a generous $4 million gift to establish the Roger D. Fisher Fellowship Fund at HLS, that will support research and teaching fellowships in negotiation and conflict resolution.

The Harvard Law School Class of 2018 selected Carol Steiker ’86 for the prestigious Albert M. Sacks-Paul A. Freund Award for Teaching Excellence.

On Class Day, May 23, U.S. Senator Jeff Flake told the Class of 2018 assembled on a sunny Holmes Field that they were entering the legal profession in a critical moment.

On April 20, HLS in the Community wrapped up a year-long celebration of Harvard Law School's bicentennial by highlighting the contributions made by HLS clinics and students practice organizations (SPOs).

As part of the “HLS in the Community” bicentennial event, HLS brought the hackathon concept to the legal space. Instead of writing code, alumni and other professionals worked together on April 20 to hack out legal solutions to social and political issues.

Students of Professor Urs Gasser’s Spring 2018 Comparative Digital Privacy seminar hosted a symposium on 'Privacy by Design,' convening experts from government, private practice, industry, and academia to weigh in on all things privacy-related, from the difficulty of defining privacy to a comparison of the regulatory regimes in the United States and the European Union.

Visiting Professor of Law and Executive Director of the Harvard Law School Project on Disability Michael Ashley Stein ’88 tackled the global issue of equal access to information in his book “Disability, Human Rights, and Information Technology,” co-edited by Jonathan Lazar, professor of Computer and Information Sciences and Director of the Undergraduate Program in Information Systems at Towson University.