Today Posts

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.

President of Ireland from 1990 to 1997 and the United Nations high commissioner for human rights from 1997 to 2002, Mary Robinson LL.M. ’68 now leads the Mary Robinson Foundation—Climate Justice. She’s the author of “Climate Justice: Hope, Resilience, and the Fight for a Sustainable Future,” published in the U.S. in September, and co-producer of Mothers of Invention, a podcast that advocates a feminist approach to fighting climate change.

The first woman to serve as the director of the Division of Enforcement at the Securities and Exchange Commission, Linda Chatman Thomsen ’79 led the Enron investigation and expanded enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. She is now a partner in Davis Polk’s litigation department.

After serving as New York’s solicitor general and working in private law practice, Preeta D. Bansal ’89 played a major role in the Obama administration’s first term as general counsel for the Office of Management and Budget. In 2015, she co-founded the Social Emergence Corporation to explore ways to encourage communication and community. She is a senior adviser to the MIT Media Lab’s Social Machines Laboratory.

A former election lawyer and the general counsel for Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign, Katie Biber ’04 now works in Silicon Valley. After a stint as senior counsel at Airbnb, she’s the general counsel and corporate secretary at Thumbtack.