Teaching & Learning

Harvard Law School Dean Martha Minow has announced that Marcia Sells will join the school as the new Dean of Students on September 21.

The latest episode of the Radio Berkman podcast looks into the payment structure of streaming music services in light of the release of a Rethink Music Initiative report on "Transparency and Money Flows in the Music Industry".

At a talk hosted by the Berkman Center for Internet Society on June 23, Mitali Thakor, a PhD student in MIT’s HASTS program and a Berkman affiliate, discussed her findings on techniques and strategies for preventing and prosecuting child exploitation and human trafficking, and how new digital approaches to addressing these issues effect young people online.

On June 22 at Harvard Law School, John Palfrey '01, director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, spoke about his new book, "BiblioTech: Why Libraries Matter More Than Ever In An Age of Google." Palfrey, who previously served as vice dean for Libraries and Information Resources at Harvard Law School, made the case that libraries are more relevant than ever in

Since at least 1983, when Harvard Law student Evan Wolfson ’83 wrote a third-year paper exploring a human rights argument for same-sex marriage, Harvard Law School has participated in anticipating, shaping, critiquing, analyzing and guiding the long path toward marriage equality.

The Harvard Law School CopyrightX course is part of a culture of experimentation in online learning that has marked HarvardX — the University’s portion of the collaborative MOOC provider platform known as edX — from the beginning: The course pioneered a parallel teaching model for online and on-campus students and, more recently, an additional hybrid model that combines online and in-person learning far from Harvard’s campus.

On May 19, the Harvard Law School Center for Health Law and Policy Innovation (CHLPI) launched a campaign to promote federal law and policy reforms for type 2 diabetes prevention and management as part of CHLPI’s broader, multi-phase Providing Access to Healthy Solutions (PATHS) initiative that first worked to strengthen local and state policy to address diet-related health conditions.

U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg received the Radcliffe Medal on Friday, May 29. Since the 1970s, Ginsburg has constantly sought to break down traditional male/female stereotypes “that held women back from doing what their talents would allow them to do.”

Dean Martha Minow applauded the many accomplishments of Class of 2015 and she praised their activism against injustice: “You led teach-ins, die-ins, and active mobilization in response to police shootings and racial injustice, and participated in criminal justice reform work. Your work changes lives,” she told the graduates.

The story of the Harvard "arms" — a shield, three books, and the word Veritas — is writ deep in the past.

The Class of 2015 honored Professor Jon Hanson with the prestigious Albert M. Sacks-Paul A. Freund Award for Teaching Excellence for his work inside the classroom as “a creative and effective teacher, combining presentations, narratives and hands-on projects.” Catherine Pattanayak ’04 was selected by the Class to receive the Suzanne L. Richardson Staff Appreciation Award for her “extraordinary support of public interest students and their careers.”

Daniel J. Meltzer '75, a renowned legal scholar and expert on federal courts and criminal procedure, and a valued legal advisor to President Barack Obama ’91, died on May 24, after a courageous battle with cancer. Meltzer was the Story Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, where he served on the faculty since 1982.

The Harvard Negotiation and Mediation Clinical Program (HNMCP) at Harvard Law School is making news for work it has done to promote civil discourse in town government and to help police mediate civilian complaints.

On Thursday, April 23, Bruce Bromley Professor of Law John Manning ’85 capped off a four-part series of “Last Lectures” for the Harvard Law School Class of 2015 with a list of eight simple rules students should live by if they wish to be both “happy lawyers and human beings.”

After their warnings about excesses and corrupt practices on Wall Street went unheeded but proved accurate, former FDIC Chair Sheila Bair, former SEC Chair Mary Schapiro, and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, formerly a bankruptcy professor at Harvard Law School, set about trying to institute meaningful financial reforms from inside federal agencies and through politics.

For the growing number of empiricists at HLS, there’s nothing quite so satisfying—or unimpeachable—as resolving a thorny, often contentious, legal or policy question through rigorous analysis of cold, hard data.

Ronald Sullivan works to make the criminal justice system more accountable

Students represent the indigent in courts where judges ask, ‘Is Harvard in the building?’

On Dec. 15, 2014, 34 Harvard Law alumni, from the Classes of 1971 to 2010, gathered at the U.S. Supreme Court to join the bar for the highest court in the nation.

In March, Harvard Law School’s Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race & Justice sponsored a dance performance at HLS titled “Dying While Black and Brown.” Presented one day before the 50th anniversary of the Selma-to-Montgomery civil rights march, it dramatized the disproportionate incarceration and execution of people of color.