Teaching & Learning

At a recent Askwith Forum on income inequality and education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, panelists including Harvard Law School Dean Martha Minow discussed interventions that have proven effective and detailed a set of building blocks for an American solution.

For the past several years, Harvard Law School students have spent their break time between semesters in Washington, D.C., parsing reams of heady data and crafting nuanced legal arguments to cases headed for the U.S. Supreme Court.

Harvard Law School Professor Jon Hanson believes that the traditional casebook method employed in many law courses and classrooms has its limitations. Last year, he devised a project he called “Frontier Torts,” in which students in his first-year torts class explored several developing areas of tort law in a much more interactive fashion than the casebook method would allow.

A decade ago, when people wanted to share vacation photos or muse about new movies online, they used MySpace or Friendster. Those star Internet destinations…

On Tuesday, Harvard Law School Professor Cass Sunstein, a member of a five-person advisory panel created by President Obama to make a sweeping review of U.S. surveillance activities, discussed the group’s efforts and the 46 recommendations it released last month, including major reforms to the way the intelligence community does business.

Harvard Law School Visiting Professor Michael Stein '88, an internationally recognized expert on disability rights, received the inaugural Morton E. Ruderman Award in Inclusion from the Ruderman Family Foundation. The award recognizes an individual who has made an extraordinary contribution to the inclusion of people with disabilities in the Jewish world and the greater public.

Last spring semester, Harvard Law School Professor and Berkman Center for Internet & Society Faculty Director William Fisher debuted CopyrightX, a free, online, noncredit course that explores copyright law. The course is being offered again this semester, improving on its unique format thanks to student feedback and data from last year.

Catharine A. MacKinnon, the Elizabeth A. Long Professor of Law at the University of Michigan Law School and the James Barr Ames Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, received the 2014 Ruth Bader Ginsburg Lifetime Achievement Award from the AALS Section on Women in Legal Education.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims has ruled that Lieutenant Colonel Wilson J. Ausmer, Jr., a highly decorated veteran, should be able to file an appeal of his disability claim even though he had missed the 120-day deadline to do so. The case was argued before the Court in October 2013 at Harvard Law School as part of the Veterans Clinic of the WilmerHale Legal Services Center of Harvard Law School.

Ari Peskoe, a former associate in the Energy Advisory Group of McDermott Will & Emery LLP, and a graduate of Harvard Law School and the University of Pennsylvania, has been named Energy Fellow in the Harvard Law School Environmental Policy Initiative.

Twenty law students take their seats in a third-floor seminar room of Wasserstein Hall, and their professors get right down to business. How do we evaluate claims made in the literature about the impact of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act on U.S. businesses and U.S. leadership around the world? Instantly, a student ventures that broad anti-corruption efforts might help the U.S. economy, even if the benefits to particular firms are unclear. For the next two hours, the air crackles with refutations, clarifications, elaborations, insights and reality checks. The break that’s scheduled at the one-hour mark comes 15 minutes late because the students are too engaged to stop.

For decades, Alan M. Dershowitz has led a frenetic life as author of dozens of books, legal counsel to a multitude of celebrities and ubiquitous TV commentator on myriad issues of the day. Known to many around the world for his brash style and high-profile cases, after 50 years, Dershowitz is now leaving the role he loves best: Harvard Law School teacher.

Some recent faculty and clinical highlights—from research on anti-corruption efforts to conferences on financial regulation.

At Harvard Law School and its library, digital experts are busy inventing the future of textbooks, the classroom and information access.

The HLS Library collection includes books and documents that highlight some of the historical rules and regulations surrounding everything comestible.

With more and more people deeply concerned about what they’re eating and what it means for our health, the economy, the environment, social justice, and even national security, Harvard Law School has created a new focus on food law.

In June, a delegation from Harvard Law School led by Dean Martha Minow embarked on a 15-day, five-stop visit to East Asia and to the fore of fast-moving developments and challenges across the region.

Human trafficking. Cybercrime. Consumer protection. Public integrity. With broad constitutional and statutory jurisdiction, state attorneys general handle all these matters and more, often in high-impact litigation. Given this variety of opportunities it provides, Harvard Law School’s Attorney General Clinic, taught by former Maine AG James E. Tierney, has been one of the most popular in the clinical program since it was instituted in 2011. And now Tierney has expanded enrollment in the clinic by using winter term to send HLS students to work in AGs’ offices across the country.

The Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology and Bioethics at Harvard Law School has joined with Duke University, Stanford University and Oxford University Press to launch and publish a new peer-reviewed, open access, online journal in 2014: Journal of Law and the Biosciences (JLB).

Jeanne Charn ’70, a senior lecturer at Harvard Law School, is the winner of the 2014 William Pincus Award for Outstanding Service and Commitment to…