Teaching & Learning

Harvard Law School Professor Michael Klarman gave a talk discussing “Racial Equality in American History” to mark his appointment as the Kirkland & Ellis Professor of Law. The wide-ranging talk, given on April 12, touched upon civil rights history, legal history, and cultural history in order to uncover, as Klarman said, “the racial attitudes and practices in American history, and how and why they change over time.”

The day after Elaine Lin ’10 finishes taking the Bar Exam in California this summer, she’ll be on a plane to Belfast. Two days later, she’ll be working with dozens of young people who have lost loved ones to terrorism—from Israel, Palestine, Ireland, Spain, India, and the U.S.—in a camp where she will teach them skills for resolving conflict.

Harvard University was recognized as one of the world’s top three open-access institutions of the year by BioMed Central, an international publisher of journals in science, technology, and medicine and a pioneer in open-access publishing. Harvard Law School was given special recognition for being one of four schools at Harvard to introduce its own open-access mandates.

In Ruthenberg v. Michigan, Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis LL.B. 1877 first formulated the principles surrounding the exercise of free speech that would appear in his later opinion in Whitney v. California (1927). The Louis D. Brandeis Papers held by the Harvard Law School Library include seven folders of drafts written by Brandeis for Ruthenberg, which have now been digitized and are available on the law school website.

From filing an emergency guardianship petition in probate court ensuring that the children of a dying mother are raised by the person she chooses, to appealing the denial of a disability claim in federal court for a critically ill client, the Harvard Law School Health Law and Policy Clinic prides itself on taking the toughest cases and working to shape policy to protect some of society’s most vulnerable people.

In recent years, political discourse has often focused on the idea of family values. Another contentious political issue has been the inheritance tax. The two topics commingle in a recent paper by Anne Alstott, in which she considers whether the inheritance tax is compatible with family values.

For ten of thousands of young people, childhood can consist of a pipeline to prison. On Thursday, April 29, 2010, the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice at Harvard Law School hosted a conference addressing the issue locally: “Coming Together to Dismantle the Cradle to Prison Pipeline in Massachusetts: A Half-Day Summit of Community, Faith and Policy Leaders.”

HLS Professor John Palfrey was appointed vice dean for library and information resources in 2008. A cyberspace visionary, his task is to meld the old, the new and the emerging digital-era library.

Harvard Law School students participating in this year’s Supreme Court Litigation Clinic wound up winning a hat trick this year, with the Supreme Court ruling in their favor in all three cases in which the clinic’s students were involved.  

The special rights guaranteed to First Nations receive inadequate attention in British Columbia when compared to mining interests, the International Human Rights Clinic (IHRC) at Harvard Law School said in a report released on June 7.

The Journal of Legal Analysis—the broad-focused, faculty-edited journal launched by Harvard Law School Professors J. Mark Ramseyer ’82 and Steven Shavell, in February 2009—is now available online. The journal is designed to provide the best legal scholarship from all disciplinary perspectives and styles, covering the span of the legal academy.

Academics from the fields of law, neuroscience, psychology, philosophy, and economics convened at Harvard Law School April 15 and 16 to discuss the moral and…

Founded five years ago as a think tank to respond to the need for leading legal scholarship at the intersection of medicine, science, and law, the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School tackles a wide range of issues, bringing together top scholars from a variety of fields in an interdisciplinary approach to some of the thorniest problems faced by society today.

During the winter term, 10 Harvard Law students participated in the school’s Supreme Court Litigation Clinic, led by Lecturers Thomas Goldstein, Amy Howe, and Kevin Russell—all of whom are leading Supreme Court practitioners and experts on appellate litigation. The clinic gave students the opportunity to spend the month of January in Washington, D.C., working on actual cases that would be heard before the Court.

Harvard Law School’s International Human Rights Clinic submitted an amicus brief to the Supreme Court in support of a petition for certiorari in a major corporate Alien Tort Statute case, Presbyterian Church of Sudan v. Talisman Energy, Inc. The Clinic served as counsel on behalf of international law scholars and jurists to argue that those who knowingly aid and abet egregious human rights violations can be held liable under customary international law.

In an address to the Harvard Law School community, HLS Dean Martha Minow offered a survey of "The Past, Present, and Future of Legal Education: HLS and Beyond.” After discussing the historical evolution of legal education up to the present "time of innovation and renewal,” she offered a preview of future trends and developments.

Legal academia is not famous for collective displays of appreciation, and even less so for the humility of its members. So the celebration of the work of William Stuntz held at Harvard Law School on March 26 and 27 was doubly extraordinary.

Solitary confinement in federal prisons is detrimental to the human brain and to the overall health of prisoners: This was the assessment of Dr. Atul Gawande, a surgeon at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston and associate professor at Harvard Medical School and the Harvard School of Public Health.

As the three most popular sports leagues in the United States all confront the end of their collective bargaining agreements in 2011, industry representatives previewed the key issues affecting negotiation, during the second annual Sports and the Law Symposium held on March 26.