Today Posts

Frantic phone calls from family and friends facing life-altering legal challenges were Felipe Hernandez' primary motivation for leaving a career in the non-profit world to attend Harvard Law School, and they continue to fuel his involvement in clinics and student practice organizations at HLS, as he hones the skills he needs to keep answering them.

Harvard Law School community members are engaged in exciting and impactful work on issues of large import—work that is framing national conversations among leaders and…

Bryan Stevenson ’85 discusses the legacy of slavery and the vision behind creating the National Memorial for Peace and Justice and The Legacy Museum in Montgomery Alabama.

Megha Parekh ’09 is in charge of all legal matters for the NFL’s Jacksonville Jaguars.

Harvard Law School Professors Jeannie Suk Gersen ’02 and Janet Halley, and Senior Lecturer on Law Nancy Gertner have issued a Comment on the Department of Education’s Proposed Rule on Title IX enforcement.

Celebrating a legal services experiment run by Harvard Law School more than 50 years ago—at a time when clinical education did not exist at the school and change was in the air.

Although arguments in the U.S. Supreme Court are not video-recorded, you can watch many of its justices questioning oralists and presiding over cases—within the State of Ames. Visit Harvard Law School’s archive of video recordings of the final rounds of the Ames Moot Court Competition.

Harvard Law School graduates across the country won political victories in the U.S. Senate and the U.S. House of Representatives as part of the nation’s 2018 midterm elections.

I joined the Prison Legal Assistance Project (PLAP) the fall of my 1L year at a time when I knew very little about the criminal justice system. I knew, however, that PLAP provided important services to prisoners in Massachusetts, including representing them in disciplinary hearings and in their bids for parole.

With the increased use of a massive volume and variety of data in our lives, our health care will inevitably be affected, note the editors of a new collection, one of the recent faculty books captured in this section.

A trailblazing career leads Patti Saris '76 to cutting-edge science and criminal justice reform.

Alumni explorations, from the blockchain, to marriage counseling, to Guantanamo Bay

HLSA President Dan Eaton ’89 wants to share the benefits of a remarkable experience.

On unexpected heroes, revenants, and being the ‘fun sponge’

Five new lawyer-scholars at Harvard Law School are already influencing the national conversation on our criminal law system.

As staff attorney with the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia for more than three years, Assistant Professor Andrew Manuel Crespo '08 represented adults and juveniles charged with felonies ranging from armed robberies to homicides. Passionate about the work, he had no plans to become an academic. But early in his career, then-Dean Martha Minow engaged him in a life-changing conversation.

Assistant Professor Crystal Yang ’13, who joined the HLS faculty in 2014, brings an empirical focus to the study of criminal law. Yang, who holds a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard, has in the past focused her empirical studies on criminal sentencing. She has now turned her attention to the extensive use of cash bail and pretrial detention in the U.S., in order to understand their short- and long-term consequences.

"I think criminal procedure is a very fundamental part of the constitutional law of democracy,” says Assistant Professor Daphna Renan, who writes about structural constitutional law, administrative law, and the Fourth Amendment. “When can the government use force against its own citizens? When can it search individuals, communities and communications? How do emergent technologies challenge existing legal frameworks? For anyone who cares about power and how law constrains and enables it, there are no more pressing questions than these.”

There are more than 2 million people imprisoned in the U.S. today. One hundred years from now, historians are likely to be fascinated by this carceral state: How did we get here? Are there better options for society? Some of the answers—or, at least, possible alternatives—may lie in an examination of medieval England. As a Harvard undergrad, Assistant Professor Elizabeth Papp Kamali ’07 fell in love with medieval legal history. After graduating from HLS, she got her Ph.D. in history at the University of Michigan, then joined the HLS faculty in 2015.

Assistant Professor Anna Lvovsky '13, who joined the HLS faculty in 2017, always planned to teach. A legal historian - she holds a Ph.D. from Harvard - with a focus on the administration of criminal justice, she teaches a seminar on the history of policing in the U.S. as well as courses on evidence and criminal law that invite students to focus on the systemic effects of seemingly neutral legal rules.