Over the course of two days last month, Harvard Law School was transformed into a United Nations of lawyers, leaders, and legal scholars, as hundreds of alumni representing every continent around the globe returned to campus to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the founding of Harvard’s Master of Laws, or LL.M., program.
Kicking off the weekend celebration was longtime Harvard law professor, former law school dean, and the university’s current provost, John F. Manning ’85.
“I’m delighted to celebrate the 100th anniversary of our LL.M. program,” he said. Speaking in front of a crowd of hundreds of program alumni who had returned to campus from all over the world to mark the occasion, Manning noted that “the LL.M. program is a big part of what makes Harvard Law School an international law school.”
Manning, who continues to serve as the school’s Dane Professor of Law, marveled that 850 people, representing 53 years of LL.M. graduates, had signed up to attend the event in Cambridge, MA. “My math suggests that that’s more than half of the century of LL.M. classes, 70 countries,” he said, grinning. “That’s amazing.”
Harvard Law is regularly recognized for producing lawyers who go on to serve as justices on the U.S. Supreme Court, including four during its current term. What is less known, Manning said, is how many LL.M. alumni serve on the highest courts of nations and jurisdictions around the globe, including: Australia, Colombia, Denmark, India, Japan, Liechtenstein, Mexico, Namibia, Pakistan, Portugal, Singapore, Slovenia, Sweden, Taiwan, and the United Kingdom, as well as on the International Criminal Court, the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea, and the International Court of Justice.
A weekend of panels, speakers, and connections
Manning’s comments came at the beginning of an extravaganza of panels, speakers, discussions, meals, and celebrations marking a century of students and graduates. The weekend included four plenary events at which panels of high court jurists, presidents and prime ministers, lawyers and scholars discussed topics ranging from judging on international and supreme courts to bridging cultures, leading nations, and the future of the law and legal education.
On Friday, Cass R. Sunstein ’78, Harvard’s Robert Walmsley University Professor, delivered a lunchtime talk to attendees titled “Nudging: Past, Present, Future.” Over the course of the two days, participants also were invited to attend a series of more than ten concurrent panels touching on nearly every aspect of law, from the emergence of AI and the persistence of armed conflict around the world to corporate law, criminal law, human rights, intellectual property, international trade, and mentorship within the profession.
In total, the anniversary program featured more than 80 speakers and panelists from across the globe, including more than 20 current members of the Harvard Law faculty. The extraordinary assembly concluded on Saturday evening with a gala at which participants were welcomed to don festive attire, including their traditional national dress.
Surveying the last century
Following Manning’s welcome address, Interim Dean John Goldberg began his remarks by transporting the audience back to the program’s early days. When the school graduated its first LL.M. class in 1924, he noted, the event’s location, Wasserstein Hall, didn’t yet exist, the school’s iconic Langdell Hall would not achieve its final form for several more years, and “it was illegal in this country to buy and sell alcohol.”
That same year, the dean at the time, Roscoe Pound, had announced in a report to Harvard University officials that legal education was at a turning point, Goldberg recounted. “What we’ve been doing up to now is great work on doctrinal analysis,” he said, paraphrasing Pound’s argument. “We need to turn our gaze outward. We need to study the law in action. And in order to do that … we need a graduate program, and we need graduate students.”
What was then a novel idea grew over subsequent decades into a fundamental part of Harvard Law School. “Back in 1924,” said Goldberg, the Carter Professor of General Jurisprudence. “I don’t think anyone would have envisioned the transformative impact that you and your fellow LL.M.s would have today. One cannot imagine Harvard Law School without you.”
In addition to the many high court justices and world leaders who have graduated from the program, Goldberg noted the number of law professors worldwide who began their journeys as LL.M. students at Harvard. These include nearly a dozen current Harvard Law professors, many of whom attendees would hear from over the course of the weekend. “And you’ll also hear from amazing, prominent academics on leading faculties of law in Colombia, Canada, France, Germany, Ghana, Mexico, and the UK,” he added.
‘The Formula One of graduate programs’
In her welcoming remarks, Gabriella Blum LL.M. ’01 S.J.D. ’03, the vice dean for Harvard Law’s Graduate Program and International Legal Studies, praised the quality of the LL.M. program, its commitment to attracting the most talented students, and the value it imparts to its graduates.
“The LL.M. program is extraordinary,” said Blum, the Rita E. Hauser Professor of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law. “It can be said without blushing that it is the Formula One of graduate programs. It is fast paced, packed, incredibly challenging, and if you do it even half right, extraordinary, rewarding, indeed transformative.”
The program, she noted, also admits the brightest students, regardless of their financial resources, and offers sufficient need-based financial aid to enable them to enroll. “It is the only large LL.M. program in the country that is committed to need blind admissions,” Blum explained, “allowing us to attract the very best from around the world, to build a truly diverse class in backgrounds, experiences, ambitions, and have a phenomenal group of lawyers teach each other and learn from each other.”
Blum urged participants to use the unique gathering to connect with classmates and exchange ideas in the ways they had when they were students. “When I greet the new LL.M.s every year, I tell them that classrooms will amount to about 40% of their LL.M. learning,” she explained. “The other 60% will come from talking to each other. Let’s all play or replay this 60% here this weekend.”
The program has blossomed since its humble early-20th century beginnings, she noted, from four graduates in the first class to more than 180 students from more than 60 jurisdictions in the Class of 2025. Another difference, Blum said, was the growing connections among LL.M. and J.D. students, who in past eras might have eyed each other more warily.
Another indication of the program’s evolution, she said, can be viewed in the growing status of the graduate students within the law school community. “What … does it mean to be a global law school?” Blum asked. “If anything, it means embracing a cross jurisdictional dialog of learning and comparing notes from other jurisdictions, of gleaning best practices and learning from failed experiments, of talking to one another.”
A then-and-now tale served to illustrate her point. “I don’t know how many of you recall this from your days in HLS, but I remember as students, the sort of informal advice was, ‘Don’t raise your hand and start a sentence with the words “in my country,” because nobody’s interested.’ So today, I tell every incoming LL.M. class: ‘Please raise your hand and tell us how it’s done in your country. We’re interested.’”
The three speakers at Friday morning’s welcome event — the provost, dean, and vice dean — went out of their way to thank attendees, as well as faculty and staff from across the law school who organized and helped support the event, especially Assistant Dean Catherine Peshkin and Nancy Pinn, the Graduate Program’s senior director of administration and student affairs. They also gave a shout out to many past program leaders, including William Alford ’77, Jerome A. and Joan L. Cohen Professor of Law, and former Assistant Dean Jeanne Tai, whose influence on graduate legal education at Harvard, and on a generation of students, is immeasurable.
The next hundred years
On Saturday afternoon, Interim Dean Goldberg moderated the event’s final panel, simply titled: “The Future.” Opening the discussion, Goldberg said, “we couldn’t have a better group of people here to weigh in on where things are headed, both in the educational environment and more broadly, in law and business and in the world.”
He was joined by Dolly Mirchandani LL.M. ’96, who leads the Global Infrastructure, Transportation and Logistics Group at White & Case; Conrado Tenaglia LL.M. ’94, co-head of the Latin America Practice at Linklaters; Pascale Fournier LL.M. ’02 S.J.D. ’07, a professor on the faculty of law at the University of Ottawa, where she focuses on human rights; Holger Spamann LL.M. ’01 S.J.D. ’09, Harvard’s Lawrence R. Grove Professor of Law; Raymond Atuguba LL.M. ’00 S.J.D. ’04, dean of the University of Ghana School of Law; and Drew MacIntyre LL.M. ’93, the vice chair of TD Securities.
Goldberg asked the panelists to weigh in on a series of questions, ranging from how their experience studying for the LL.M. degree at Harvard Law prepared them for their careers to the changes they’ve witnessed in the profession since graduating, the current and future impact of AI, and the transformations they predict in the coming decades.
Mirchandani highlighted two heartening trends she’s observed in the legal profession since she graduated nearly 30 years ago. First, there are far more women serving in senior leadership roles. “I think a lot of progress has been made, and so we should celebrate that,” adding that a recent backlash against efforts to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion, especially in the U.S., has heightened the need to find ways to continue that progress.
She also believes that there is a much greater emphasis on supporting lawyers’ mental health than in the past, especially since the onset of the COVID pandemic in 2020. “It’s a tough profession,” Mirchandani said. “Excellence is hard to achieve. And professionals do need coping mechanisms and support mechanisms.”
In response to a question about what the legal profession might look like in the next 20 years, Holger Spamann echoed the Major League Baseball catcher and coach, Yogi Berra, noting that “prediction is difficult, especially about the future.” More seriously, Spamann said he believes that Harvard Law School will increasingly be a place where future leaders in every field will converge to receive the necessary training.
Striking a similar theme, Conrado Tenaglia recalled his apprehension when, earlier in his career, he had been asked to take on a management role, thinking to himself that he’d attended Harvard Law School, but not the Kennedy School of Government or Harvard Business School. But then he recalled how struck he’d been by the chance to discuss issues of mutual interest with the law school dean over breakfast, an opportunity he hadn’t had at his first law school. Today, he said, having breakfast or tea “or whatever” with colleagues across his organization is a regular feature of the way he approaches management.
Drew MacIntyre said he believes that the larger law school may come to resemble its LL.M. program more closely in the way it approaches legal education. “The power of this program is global perspective, and I think the school could be pushed more and more towards global perspective,” he said. “I know a lot of students feel this is an American school, but I think this is a global school.” When he arrived at Harvard three decades ago, he took a “more black and white” approach to the law, he said, but in meeting people from different countries, “you realize there’s a whole lot of gray out there.”
Responding to a question about the AI revolution, Pascale Fournier noted that students and faculty are already using the tool, despite its many flaws, which can include being built on data that itself might be inaccurate or contain embedded biases. “I think AI is changing the classroom. And to me, there are two ways to approach this,” she said. “The first is to basically say, ‘Okay, we’re going to go without computers, we’re going to pass with oral exams. We will just refrain from this.’ But the other approach is to say there’s no going back. The new generation is using this. We cannot control it … So, how do we use it to our advantage?”
Fournier believes that students and practitioners need to be taught how to think critically about how they use AI. “So, we see more and more in Canada some faculties that will have that approach, that will basically say, ‘Students, why don’t you use AI for that exam, but have your critical theory approach to what AI is telling you.’”
Goldberg concluded the discussion by asking panelists to offer a word of advice to current and future LL.M. students.
Raymond Atuguba urged students to use their time at Harvard to meet and learn from their peers in the U.S. and around the globe. Students should “spend as much time networking,” as studying, he said. “The networks you create are more valuable than anything you learn in the classroom.”
MacIntyre relayed a self-effacing piece of advice he said his wife of 33 years often gives him. “Sometimes, Drew, it’s not all about you,” he said, drawing laughter from the audience. He urged students to think about the greater good. “We have a responsibility, having come to this institution, to deliver for society.”
Spamann shared a version of the advice — that “you can do anything” — he remembers receiving when he first arrived at Harvard Law. Don’t assume there are boundaries keeping you from your aspirations, he urged students. Instead, he said, “Go for it. … If you aim for the right target, you have a better chance of hitting it. You probably won’t, but that’s not all bad,” he said to a warm round of applause.
Fournier told students to “dream big,” “identify your blind spots,” “seek diversity of perspectives,” and, finally, to “take risks.”
Tenaglia remembered the novelty of being able to shop courses for the first time, which highlighted for him the value of exploration. His advice? “Go out, and keep your eyes and ears open,” because you’ll never know what might find.
Mirchandani asked students to remember that they have a responsibility for creating the future. “So, it’s incumbent on us to be solution-providers.”
WATCH LL.M. 100: Transforming Lives and Law Around the World
The LL.M. 100 plenary sessions and panels focused on the transformative power of the LL.M. program across different sectors of the legal profession and areas of practice, both in the ways the program has transformed its participants, and in the ways those participants have had a transformative effect on the law and their countries and communities. Here, you can see the four plenary sessions from the gathering: Judges and Judging on International and Supreme Courts; Bridging Cultures; World Leaders; and The Future.
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