Teaching & Learning

The legal profession is going through dramatic change, affected by factors ranging from globalization to new technology to a fragile economic recovery. And a Harvard Law School institution dedicated to studying the profession is undergoing its own big change.

During World War I, about 400,000 “enemy aliens” were imprisoned by all sides in camps on nearly every continent. During that time, Germany’s only exclusively civilian prison camp, Ruhleben Gefangenenlager, became a model of civil functionality.

A fellowship for lawyers who want to teach and study law helps to cultivate the next generation of law professors.

From the statehouse to the schoolhouse, an HLS initiative changes the paradigm for educating young people who have experienced trauma.

On Monday, Nov. 17, Judge Frank Easterbrook of the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals kicked off an inaugural lecture series named after his old friend, colleague and intellectual compatriot, Justice Antonin Scalia, who attended the talk titled “Interpreting the Unwritten Constitution.”

Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger visited the Harvard Law School campus last week to share some of the lessons learned as adviser to Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford.

This fall, Harvard Law School Dean Martha Minow and Julio Frenk, dean of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, issued the "Deans' Food System Challenge" (one of several competitions held by the Harvard Innovation Lab and sponsored by Harvard Schools), encouraging students across the university to come up with fresh ideas for solving complex problems facing our food system.

Mary Bonauto, director of the Civil Rights Project of the Gay & Lesbian Advocates and Defenders (GLAD), spoke Tuesday at a brown-bag luncheon at Harvard Law School, during which she was interviewed by Dean Martha Minow and fielded questions from students in the audience.

In just two years, more than 30 HLS students have enrolled in the Veterans’ Legal Clinic—housed at the WilmerHale Legal Services Center (LSC) in Jamaica Plain, of which HLS Clinical Professor Daniel Nagin is faculty director—and represented more than 100 clients in the areas of federal and state veterans’ benefits, discharge upgrades, and estate-planning matters.

In August, the Disabled American Veterans (DAV) Charitable Service Trust significantly increased an existing grant to expand its support of the Veterans Legal Clinic and other veterans’ advocacy program at Harvard Law School’s WilmerHale Legal Services Center.

As an NBA All Star, Dikembe Mutombo battled Hakeem Olajuwon on the court. These days, his opponents, malaria and Ebola, are requiring much more than an emphatic block and his trademark “not in my house” finger waggle. Mutombo now uses his considerable stature to address his lifelong goal of improving the health, wellbeing, and future of the people of his home country, the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

The Harvard Immigration and Refugee Clinical Program at HLS, which marked its 30th anniversary this year, trains students to represent refugees seeking asylum in the U.S.

Harvard Overseer and legal scholar Kenji Yoshino said he was surprised by the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision Monday to let stand appeals court rulings that in effect allow same-sex marriages to proceed in five states, but he has no doubt about where the issue is headed.

Bharat Anand, a partner at Khaitan & Co., in New Delhi, India, was the keynote speaker on Sept. 23 at an event sponsored by the Center On The Legal Profession at Harvard Law School. Khaitan & Co. partners with the Center on the Legal Profession’s Globalization, Lawyers and Emerging Economies (GLEE) on research in India.

On September 19, Harvard Law School hosted a celebration of the 30-year anniversary of the school’s Human Rights Program (HRP), a home for human rights scholarship and advocacy founded in 1984 by Professor Emeritus Henry J. Steiner.

The president of the Republic of Ghana, John Dramani Mahama, visited Harvard Law School on Friday, Sept. 26, to meet with Dean Martha Minow and to attend a private lunch hosted by the Human Rights Program.

Individuals and communities can improve the food system, according to members of the Harvard Law School Food Law and Policy Clinic, which has launched a year-long, university-wide focus on how to make food distribution more equitable, sustainable, and nutritious.

On September 12, Justice Albie Sachs, who served on South Africa’s inaugural Constitutional Court from 1994 through 2009, visited Harvard Law School for a screening and discussion of “Soft Vengeance: Albie Sachs and the New South Africa” with filmmaker Abby Ginzberg.