Today Posts

Harvard Law School's International Human Rights Clinic has released a new report, "Securing Status: Syrian refugees and the documentation of legal status, identity, and family relationships in Jordan," that details the challenges Syrian refugees living outside refugee camps encounter obtaining official documents from the Government of Jordan.

Last December in suburban Paris, 195 countries reached a landmark agreement to curb greenhouse gas emissions. For Todd Stern ’77 the Paris accord capped two decades of work to curb climate change.

This fall, Harvard Law School lecturer Nancy Gertner, Harvard sociologist Bruce Western and Vincent Schiraldi, senior research fellow and director of the Harvard Kennedy School’s Program in Criminal Justice Policy and Management, are teaching a new Harvard course that will help students become part of the effort to reform the nation’s criminal justice system.

This fall, Harvard Law School held a conference in celebration of the career of legal historian and HLS Professor Charles Donahue. Scholars came from around the country and around the world and spoke on topics related to medieval and early modern history.

At a recent event, several HLS professors discussed the scope and limits of a president’s executive and judicial powers, the role the courts may play, and the ways in which Trump could reshape the authority and operation of an array of government agencies.

The American Law Institute has elected HLS Professors Kenneth Mack ‘91 and William Rubenstein ’86 as members.

In their latest collaboration, Professor Carol Steiker ’86 and her brother, Jordan Steiker ’88, a law professor at the University of Texas, have co-written a new book, “Courting Death: The Supreme Court and Capital Punishment,” in which they argue that the Court has failed in its efforts to regulate the death penalty since Gregg v. Georgia, its 1976 decision that allowed capital punishment to resume.

Noah Feldman, director of the newly-established Julis-Rabinowitz Program in Jewish and Israeli Law recently spoke with Harvard Law Today about the scope of Jewish law, his aspirations for the program, and his own background in the subject.

The HLS Fair Punishment Project’s Legal Advisory Council has issued an issue brief arguing that a sentencer may impose a life without parole sentence upon a juvenile only after concluding that the child is “the rare juvenile offender who exhibits such irretrievable depravity that rehabilitation is impossible.”

In a recent conversation at HLS with Dean Martha Minow, Mary Robinson, former president of Ireland and U.N. special envoy on El Niño and climate change, told the story of how she came to be an “Angry Granny” on the topic of climate change, starting with her discussions with people in the most deeply affected communities.

A photo exhibit featuring portraits of legal scholars who represent traditionally marginalized voices will be displayed in Harvard Law School’s Wasserstein Hall from Nov. 17-22.

Regulations to fight climate change likely will be casualties of the incoming Trump administration, but environmental experts taking stock of the changing American political landscape said that work in the field will continue elsewhere and that a broad-based rollback of U.S. environmental protection will prove easier said than done.

The Football Players Health Study at Harvard University today released a set of legal and ethical recommendations to address a series of structural factors that affect NFL player health. The Football Players Health Study is a research initiative composed of several ongoing studies examining the health and wellbeing of NFL players.

Rebecca Tushnet, a leading First Amendment scholar, will join the faculty of Harvard Law School as the inaugural Frank Stanton Professor of First Amendment Law.

In October, Kristin Fleschner ’14 returned to the Harvard Law campus to share with current students her work in disability rights and her experiences as a blind lawyer. Her talk was followed by a showing of “Blind Ambition,” a documentary that she produced as a 2L with the support of the Dean of Students Office.

An op-ed by Jody Freeman: The stunning results of the 2016 election have prompted headlines suggesting that Trump will, with the help of the Republican Congress, dramatically reverse the Obama legacy on climate, energy and the environment. But how realistic is this threat? The short answer is: the picture is significantly more complicated, and markedly less bleak, than the headlines suggest.

Harvard Law Today presents a recap of the 2016 election season in images, words, and photos.

Students, faculty, and guests entering Harvard Law School's Wasserstein’s ground-floor lounge on election evening were greeted by two large sheet cakes decked out with red, white, and blue balloons, along with stars made of frosting.

HLS students Tony Garofano LL.M. ’17 and Sarah Grant ’19 spoke with writers for Harvard Law Today about their experiences serving in the military and studying at Harvard Law.