Teaching & Learning

Helena Alviar first came to Harvard Law School from Bogotá, Colombia on a Fulbright Scholarship in 1996, and developed a particular interest in understanding the historical, economic, and sociological circumstances in which law develops. When she returned five years later with her S.J.D. degree, it was with a renewed sense of responsibility.

In November, the Harvard Negotiation and Mediation Clinical Program celebrated its 10th anniversary, marking its evolution into a robust program of global clinical work in dispute systems design, innovative pedagogy around teamwork, and expanded course offerings in multiparty negotiation, group decision-making, teams and facilitation.

This fall at a symposium presented by the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, representatives from academia, government and civil liberties organizations came together to examine the present state of play with respect to government transparency and freedom of information.

During the fall 2016 semester, a group of leading scholars came together at Harvard Law School for the lecture series, "Diversity and US Legal History," which was sponsored by Dean Martha Minow and organized by Professor Mark Tushnet, who also designed a reading group to complement the lectures.

A system that makes healthy food expensive and junk food cheap should be fixed, said a panel of experts who gathered at Harvard Law School on Nov. 30 to discuss “Transforming Our Food System,” a discussion sponsored by the HLS Food Law and Policy Clinic in partnership with the Union of Concerned Scientists.

On November 9, 2016, the Honorable Robert Russell, founder of the nation’s first Veterans Treatment Court delivered the 2016 DAV Distinguished Speaker Lecture at Harvard Law School.

Harvard Law School's International Human Rights Clinic has released a new report, "Securing Status: Syrian refugees and the documentation of legal status, identity, and family relationships in Jordan," that details the challenges Syrian refugees living outside refugee camps encounter obtaining official documents from the Government of Jordan.

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.