Today Posts

Craig Newmark, noted philanthropist and founder of the wildly successful no-frills website Craigslist, visited HLS in a Berkman Center-sponsored informal discussion on November 14. 

This year, Summer Public Interest Funding enabled HLS students to explore public service in 27 states and 35 countries around the world. More than $1.8 million Summer Public Interest Funding was awarded to 373 students this summer. Here’s a look at what four students did with their summer funding.

Rutherford B. Hayes, Harvard Law School class of 1845, was the first and only other HLS alum to be elected president of the United States.

During its 40th anniversary celebration, the Council on Legal Education Opportunity (CLEO) recognized Professor Emeritus Frank E.A. Sander ’52, and Harvard Law School as a whole, for historic efforts to increase the numbers of minority students in law schools.

To mark the 60th anniversary of the ratification of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), Facing History and Ourselves and Harvard Law School convened some of the world’s leading human rights scholars, practitioners, and educators for an international conference entitled, “Universal Rights in Societies of Difference."

Delivering the Francis Biddle Memorial Lecture at HLS on November 12, Yale Law School Professor Ian Ayres applied his unique brand of number crunching to evaluate statistical models that have been employed to measure police racial bias in decisions to stop vehicles and pedestrians.

Former U.S. Rep. Louis Stokes, who represented Ohio’s 21st district in Congress from 1969 to 1999, spoke at HLS on November 12, at the invitation of Harvard Law School’s Charles Hamilton Institute for Race and Justice.

“Each of us is more than the worst thing we’ve ever done.”
Those words, written by noted death penalty lawyer Bryan Stevenson ’85, were very much on the mind of Katie Wozencroft ’09 this summer, when she made the four-hour drive from Atlanta to an Alabama prison where condemned prisoners are executed.

Individual free choice, an idea that permeates common sense and legal theory, assumes that actions reflect the stable preferences of individual actors. Individuals are responsible for their actions (that is, their preference-driven choices), and laws can therefore be designed on that assumption.

Andrew Klaber JD/MBA ’10 has been selected as one of 160 emerging leaders from 30 countries in the Asia-Pacific region for the Asia Society’s Third Annual Asia 21 Young Leaders Summit.

Several members of the Harvard Law School faculty knew both Barack and Michelle Obama during their time as students, and have stayed in touch with them over the years. Here, some of them react to the election.

Two days after winning the election, the Obama team has quickly set to work putting together a transition team which will coordinate the move to the White House in January. Yesterday, Obama appointed three of his HLS classmates and one former HLS professor and alumnus to top transition team posts.

On an election day that saw record voter turnout numbers in states across the country, Harvard Law School graduates awaited their electoral fates. Aside from Barack Obama’s ’91 historic victory in the Presidential election, six HLS alumni are currently headed to the Senate and 12 to the House, with a few elections still too close to call.

The following op-ed, “Morning-after pride,” was written by Professor Laurence Tribe '66. It appeared in the November 5, 2008, edition of Forbes Magazine.

Barack Obama ’91 has won the general election for the presidency of the United States. Michelle Obama ’88 will become the first HLS alumna to serve as First Lady.

It was as a law student that Obama first made history—and national headlines—when he was elected the first black president of the Harvard Law Review…

Michael B. Chertoff ’78, who will be stepping down as secretary of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security next January when a new Presidential administration takes office, took time following a panel presentation in October to answer questions about his experiences on the job and his plans for the future.

Celebrated filmmaker Ken Burns was joined by writer and collaborator Geoffrey C. Ward, cultural critic Stanley Crouch and Harvard Kennedy School professor Edward Schumacher-Matos in a panel discussion on the role of race in Burns’ documentaries.

Finn M.W. Caspersen ’66 and Peter Krause ’74 were honored for their service to Harvard Law School at this year’s annual fall reunions, which took place on October 24-26 at HLS.

In a two-day conference sponsored by Harvard Law School’s Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice—titled “Charting New Pathways to Participation and Membership”—attendees from the worlds of law, labor, government, academia talked about the obstacles to justice faced by many groups and how those impediments might be overcome.

With the possible departures of as many as three members of the U.S. Supreme Court’s “liberal bloc” over the next four years, appointments to the nation’s top court by the next president could have a profound impact on the Court’s makeup for decades.