Teaching & Learning

This fall, Harvard Law School lecturer Nancy Gertner, Harvard sociologist Bruce Western and Vincent Schiraldi, senior research fellow and director of the Harvard Kennedy School’s Program in Criminal Justice Policy and Management, are teaching a new Harvard course that will help students become part of the effort to reform the nation’s criminal justice system.

At a recent event, several HLS professors discussed the scope and limits of a president’s executive and judicial powers, the role the courts may play, and the ways in which Trump could reshape the authority and operation of an array of government agencies.

The HLS Fair Punishment Project’s Legal Advisory Council has issued an issue brief arguing that a sentencer may impose a life without parole sentence upon a juvenile only after concluding that the child is “the rare juvenile offender who exhibits such irretrievable depravity that rehabilitation is impossible.”

In a recent conversation at HLS with Dean Martha Minow, Mary Robinson, former president of Ireland and U.N. special envoy on El Niño and climate change, told the story of how she came to be an “Angry Granny” on the topic of climate change, starting with her discussions with people in the most deeply affected communities.

A photo exhibit featuring portraits of legal scholars who represent traditionally marginalized voices will be displayed in Harvard Law School’s Wasserstein Hall from Nov. 17-22.

Regulations to fight climate change likely will be casualties of the incoming Trump administration, but environmental experts taking stock of the changing American political landscape said that work in the field will continue elsewhere and that a broad-based rollback of U.S. environmental protection will prove easier said than done.

Harvard Law Today presents a recap of the 2016 election season in images, words, and photos.

Constitutional Law expert Sanford Levinson focused on the political implications of the Electoral College at HLS on Oct. 21. He emphasized that the U.S. Electoral College system is unique among the election processes of major countries, which tend towards popular vote models, and he connected it to what he terms “the Constitution of settlement."

With his recent gift of $1 million and a subsequent matching gift of $500,000 to support individual donations of up to $50,000 through December, Charles Thomas is hoping to make farm animals central to animal cruelty prevention.

In 1949, four years after the Nuremberg war crime trials began, the Harvard Law Library received the most complete set of documents from the Nazi prosecutions outside that of the National Archives; now, a small team is working on analyzing and digitizing the documents--often, a difficult and haunting task--for the HLS Nuremberg Trials Project.

Harvard Law School, the Harvard University Native American Program, and the Harvard Native American Law Students Association held a a two-day conference in October to examine relations between Native Americans and state and federal governments.

In late October Harvard Law School celebrated National Pro Bono Week with a number of events to honor the outstanding work of lawyers who volunteer their time to help people in their communities.

In Nima, a large community in the center of Accra, Ghana, water flows through the plumbing system of a small human rights advocacy office for only a few hours each day. Professor Lucie White and some of the first students in Making Rights Real: the Ghana Project learned this the hard way.

HLS Professor Charles Ogletree ’78 announced this summer that he has been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease and said he will work to raise awareness of the disease and its disproportionate effect on African-Americans. In sharing his story and putting a spotlight on this disease, he is continuing his lifelong efforts to help others.

International trade traditionally has been a Harvard Law School strength, but since Mark Wu’s arrival at HLS in 2011, educational opportunities in the field have exploded.

By now, many people are familiar with bitcoin. What’s less well known is the currency’s technological underpinning, the blockchain, an emergent technology that could reshape financial and property markets, and the legal frameworks that support them.

The Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance and Financial Regulation blog has been serving as a forum for exchange of ideas and debate among lawyers, executives, institutional investors, academics and regulators for the past 10 years.

South Africa has failed to meet its human rights obligations to address the environmental and health effects of gold mining in and around Johannesburg, the Harvard Law School International Human Rights Clinic (IHRC) said in a new report.

Earlier this month, Harvard Law School’s Royall Professor of Law, Janet Halley, took first-year HLS students in her Reading Group on the Law School’s connection to New England’s slavery heritage to visit the Royall House and Slave Quarters in Medford, Massachusetts.

Harvard Professor Oliver Hart, a co-winner of this year’s Nobel Prize in Economics, has been a key participant in Harvard Law School’s program in law and economics for 25 years.