Today Posts

As our bicentennial year draws to a close, we invite you to reflect on the stories that have shaped Harvard Law School over the past 200 years.

With Evisort, a powerful new search engine that harnesses cloud storage and artificial intelligence, four HLS students hope to revolutionize the costly and labor-intensive way that lawyers currently handle contracts and other transactional work, liberating them for more creative and interesting tasks.

Bryan Stevenson has battled through the courts, defending the wrongly convicted and children prosecuted as adults, while condemning mass incarceration and racial bias in the criminal justice system; now, he is embarking on a fight to start a national conversation about the painful legacy of slavery, which he says “continues to haunt us today.”

This fall, the Harvard Law School Library hosted a series of book talks by HLS authors, with topics ranging from Justice and Leadership in Early Islamic Courts to a Citizen's Guide to Impeachment. As part of this ongoing series, faculty authors from various disciplines shared their research and discussed their recently published books.

This year, Jon Hanson challenged his torts students to create short documentaries about how tort law might apply to social issues and problems on the edge of the law’s reach. This challenge culminated in the inaugural Torty Awards--a screening and ceremony celebrating their inventive films on climate change, driverless cars, and the Flint water crisis.

Louis W. Fisher '16 has been selected as the inaugural Harvard Law Review Public Interest Fellow. He will spend a year working at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. and will have the opportunity to have a piece relating to his work considered for publication in the Law Review’s online Forum.

This fall, Glenn Cohen, Harvard Law School professor and faculty director for the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics delivered a talk titled “Are There Non-human Persons? Are There Non-person Humans?,” which explored how law and morality should accommodate animals and artificial intelligence alongside human beings.

The trajectory of state intelligence gathering and invasions of privacy made possible by a digital environment were the focus of a session titled “National Security: National Security, Privacy, and the Rule of Law,” part of the HLS in the World bicentennial summit which took place at Harvard Law School on Friday, October 27, 2017.

In honor of Harvard Law School’s bicentennial, in October the Harvard Law Review published a collection of six articles exploring Harvard’s contribution to the development of the law, and how that history will shape the future of the law in theory and practice.

Managing Director of the Cyberlaw Clinic Professor Chris Bavitz discusses some of the concerns and opportunities of risk assessment tools for criminal justice reform efforts, and the Berkman Klein Center's work on Ethics and Governance of AI initiative in partnership with the MIT Media Lab.

Mentorships between Harvard Law School professors and the students who followed them into academia have taken many forms over the course of two centuries.

Sarah Benzidi LL.M. ’17 has been named the national winner of the inaugural NYBSA/ACCTM National Championship Alternative Dispute Resolution Law Student Writing Competition. Benzidi received her award and $10,000 prize at a ceremony in New York on Oct. 26.

ImeIme Umana ’18, the Harvard Law Review's 131st president, on how scholarship—and the Law Review itself—have changed through the centuries.

With jokes, songs and, yes, real talent, the annual Parody show has brought the HLS community together in laughter for more than 50 years.

John Manning ’85 on getting advice, giving it and “doing disagreement right.”

A room that was meant to offer a respite from the rigors of the Harvard Law School curriculum became a portal to exploring some of the most important issues in American law.

On a clear, windy afternoon in early September at the opening of its bicentennial observance, Harvard Law School unveiled a memorial on campus.

Since April 1948, when the inaugural eight-page issue of the Harvard Law School Bulletin was sent to all graduates, the Bulletin has been covering the school, its students and—in more recent years—its alumni.

A sampling from the Harvard Law Review Bicentennial issue

At the end of October, some 3,000 members of the HLS community participated in Harvard Law School’s Bicentennial Summit: HLS in the World.

In September, as part of its bicentennial program, Harvard Law School celebrated the arts with a two-day festival featuring the work of alumni, staff, faculty and students.