Teaching & Learning

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.

Two recent Harvard Law School graduates, Shannon Erwin ’10 and Alana Greer ’11, have been selected as recipients of grants from the Public Service Venture Fund, a unique program that awards up to $1 million each year to help graduating Harvard Law students and recent graduates obtain their ideal jobs in public service.

National concerns over racial justice lead to campus introspection, discussion, research, and action They are short, stark sentences, seared into the public consciousness in recent…

Harvard Law School Professor Vicki C. Jackson will serve as reporter for a project, sponsored by the American Law Institute, that will examine college and university procedures surrounding allegations of sexual misconduct on campus.

On Friday, Feb. 6, after several town hall meetings in which Harvard Law students and faculty shared their experiences and observations of discrimination and systemic injustice, as well as hopes for pedagogical and cultural shifts at the law school, the HLS community convened to discuss a somewhat more familiar law school topic: legal and policy reforms.

The recent report "Arab Religious Skeptics Online: Anonymity, Autonomy, and Discourse in a Hostile Environment," authored by Helmi Noman and published by the Berkman Center for Internet & Society's Internet Monitor project examines the emergence of religious skeptics in Arab cyberspace.

The Harvard Law School Center for Health Law and Policy Innovation has spearheaded the filing of an amicus brief in the U.S. Supreme Court, requesting that the Court affirm a court of appeals decision upholding the nationwide provision of federal subsidies under the Affordable Care Act.

Carrie Fletcher has been appointed as the new executive director of Harvard Law School Executive Education, where she works with faculty and an administrative team to develop leadership programs that serve law firm managing partners, emerging law firm leaders, and general counsel from across the globe.

On Nov. 24, the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard hosted “Too Big to Fail or Too Hard to Remember: Lessons from the New Deal and the Triumph, Tragedy, and Lost Legacy of James M. Landis,” a discussion of the legacy of scholar, administrator, advocate and political adviser known for his seminal contribution to the creation of the modern system of market regulation in the United States.

And discussions have continued into the new year about the policy and procedures of police, prosecutors and the community at large.

Starting this month, Harvard Law Professor Charles Fried, who has been teaching the intricacies of the law to HLS students for nearly 50 years, is expanding his student body dramatically with the start of his online ContractsX course, a seven-week study of contracts for nonlawyers.

Dean Martha Minow welcomed former Senator Olympia Snowe and Jason Grumet ’98 to Harvard Law School on Oct. 30 to discuss their work at the Bipartisan Policy Center (BPC) and the recent report, Governing in a Polarized America: A Bipartisan Blueprint to Strengthen our Democracy.

A former NBA All Star turned humanitarian. Supreme Court justices. Student protests. Take a look at some highlights of the people who visited and events that took place this semester at Harvard Law School.

At a time when policing, prosecutorial discretion, the death penalty, and criminal justice as a whole are under tremendous scrutiny in the United States, a new initiative at Harvard Law School seeks to analyze problems within the U.S. criminal justice system and look for solutions.