Teaching & Learning

For Lani Guinier, the mission of higher education is—or should be—democracy.

In July, HLS Professor Daniel Halperin, will retire after after more than a half-century as a tax lawyer, professor and government official as will Duncan Kennedy who in 30 of his years on the faculty has taught one-fourth of every HLS entering class contracts, property or torts.

The Global Anticorruption Lab, taught by HLS Professor Matthew Stephenson ’03, offers law students an unusual opportunity to hone concise writing skills through the crafting of blog posts that are read and commented on by high-level stakeholders around the world.

800 years later, the ‘great charter’ still fascinates

Located on the first and second floors of Wasserstein Hall—the heart of social and academic activity on the HLS campus—Harvard Law School's historic collection of faculty portraits provide a backdrop for the daily routines and informal interactions of students and faculty members.

The International Human Rights Clinic and Human Rights Watch recently released 'Mind the Gap: The Lack of Accountability for Killer Robots,' a 38-page report that details significant hurdles to assigning personal accountability for the actions of fully autonomous weapons under both criminal and civil law.

For law students interested in entrepreneurism and startups—as entrepreneurs themselves, as lawyers representing startups, or both—there is a wealth of growing and intersecting opportunities at Harvard Law School and across the university.

The Berkman Center for Internet and Society and Youth and Media released a new ebook 'Digitally Connected: Global Perspectives on Youth and Digital Media,' a first-of-its kind collection of essays that offers reflections from diverse perspectives on youth experiences with digital media and with focus on the Global South.

On March 28-29, The Harvard Food Law Society and the Food Literacy Project hosted the “Just Food? Forum on Justice in the Food System” at Harvard Law School, organized as part of Harvard’s yearlong Food Better initiative, created to discuss issues surrounding what we eat.

Elizabeth Papp Kamali ’07, a scholar specializing in medieval legal history, will join the Harvard Law School faculty as an assistant professor in July.

In late March, a two-day hackathon organized by the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics and MIT Center for Civic Media brought together technologists and thinkers to come up with new ways to stem corporate and government corruption.

This Fall, Harvard Law School Dean Martha Minow and Julio Frenk, dean of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, issued a challenge to students across the university to come up with fresh ideas for solving complex problems facing our food system in the United States and around the world.

In a talk sponsored by International Legal Studies on February 11, former NPR correspondent Sarah Chayes, currently senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment, spoke to HLS students about the links, historical and current, between corruption and global security.

Dehlia Umunna has been appointed Clinical Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. She has been a lecturer at HLS since 2007, and is Deputy Director and Clinical Instructor at HLS’s Criminal Justice Institute (CJI).

"Powering the African Dream," a two-day series of roundtable discussions on the role of African women in in the United Nations' post-2015 Development Agenda and the Beijing +20 Review Process, was held at Harvard Law School on March 9-10.

Gabrielle Giffords, former U.S. Representative from Arizona, and her husband Mark Kelly, a Navy pilot and NASA astronaut, will be this year’s speakers for the Class Day ceremonies at Harvard Law School. Class Day will take place on Wednesday, May 27, 2015.

On March 6, Harvard Law School’s Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice hosted Dying While Black and Brown, a dance performance focused on capital punishment and the disproportionate numbers of incarcerated people of color. The performance was first commissioned by the San Francisco Equal Justice Society as part of the society’s campaign to restore 14th Amendment protections for victims of discrimination, including those on death row.

It’s been just a year since Thomas Piketty’s “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” turned the respected French economist from the University of Paris into an academic and publishing rock star. Piketty’s status showed little sign of fading during his March 6 visit to Harvard to speak about the book before an overflow crowd inside Austin Hall at Harvard Law School.

In a Feb. 6 talk sponsored by International Legal Studies, the Harvard International Arbitration Law Students Association, and the International Law Journal, Emmanuel Gaillard and Yas Banifatemi LL.M. ’97, head of international arbitration and head of public international law, respectively, at Shearman & Sterling, detailed the intricate story behind securing the historic $50 billion award for the Yukos Oil Cooperative against the Russian Federation.