Teaching & Learning

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.

At a December 2 event sponsored by Harvard Law School's Brazilian Studies Association and its Committee on Sports and Entertainment Law, experts convened at to discuss digital media's place in the future of the global sports business model.

At the inaugural Disabled American Veterans Distinguished Speaker Series at Harvard Law School, U.S. Secretary of Veterans Affairs Robert McDonald said the troubled agency is making progress in getting its house in order, citing more — and more timely — appointments and authorizations to see private doctors for veterans who live far from VA hospitals.

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.