Because every good dessert needs a little tart reform.”
So says the submission for raspberry cheesecake brownies, one of more than two dozen entries that vied for first place in this year’s Rakoff Bake Off, the most highly anticipated event of the year for Harvard Law students in Section Seven.
An annual tradition led by Harvard Law School Professor Todd D. Rakoff ’75 for more than a decade, the delectable contest is a moment for first-year students to briefly set aside their study of landmark cases to focus on creating showstopper cakes and cookies.
For this year’s Rakoff Bake Off, held on Feb. 6, students anonymously submitted baked goods with pun-based legal names and descriptions drawing from their legal studies. Gone were the happy Hollywood handshakes, perilous proving drawers, and infamous soggy bottoms familiar to viewers of the event’s British namesake. In their place, the student bakers demonstrated their hard-won expertise in the language and ingredients of law, with a sprinkling of humor on top.
A frosted cake garnished with strawberries, blackberries, and raspberries, submitted with a dish of cherry tomatoes, was accompanied by an excerpt from Nix v. Hedden, an 1893 United States Supreme Court decision that tomatoes are vegetables, not fruits, for the purpose of tariffs and customs.
“Botanically speaking tomatoes are the fruit of a vine … which constitute the principal part of the repast, and not, like fruits generally, as dessert,” it read.
Other submissions included an “Arbitrary and DELICIOUS Basque cheesecake,” “Brown (butter) v. Board (of double chocolate) cookies,” “Intelligible Princ-apple,” a Jewish apple cake decorated with cut-out portraits of section leaders Rakoff and Susannah Barton Tobin ’04, and a Cuban flan titled “Writ of flan-damus.”
Susannah Barton Tobin ’04, the Ezra Ripley Thayer Senior Lecturer on Law, who directs the First-Year Legal Research and Writing Program, oversaw taste-testing and helped issue final verdicts with Rakoff and fellow judges Michael Mitchell ’23, a current Climenko fellow, and Regan Hawkins ’25 and Devanshi Nishar ’26, current members of the Board of Student Advisers. (Mitchell, Hawkins and Nishar were all members of Section Seven when they were first-year students at Harvard Law.) Key to the event’s success were section committee members Priya Kaur ’27 and Matthew Hohmann ’27, who organized the event and managed the myriad details from start to finish.
This year’s winning confection was a chocolate babka infused with orange liqueur cointreau, baked by Nate Orbach ’27. In addition to a trophy adorned with a spatula, spoon, and knife, baking star Orbach received a promise of a loaf of bread, personally baked by Rakoff.
This year’s celebration was particularly bittersweet as it marked the last semester of Rakoff’s forty-year teaching career at Harvard Law School.
Rakoff, who has taught at the law school since 1979, and who has been actively involved in many of the institution’s educational experiments and pedagogical reforms over the last quarter century, will retire from teaching at the end of this semester.
As part of his winning confection, Orbach submitted an acrostic sonnet, “Rakoff Bake Off,” which captured the prevailing sentiment of this beloved tradition and professor.
Rakoff: Professor of the highest rank,
A legal education guaranteed —
King Todd! How could we e’er express our thanks?
O wise and warm and wonderful is he,
For the gift of his teaching, bestowed upon
Forty years of grateful students, all much
Better off than any others. He dons
A trademark, a unique personal touch:
Knit ties — and they are never out of stock,
Ever will there be one warming his neck
—but no matter, Section Seven, your flock,
Onto our own paths we are soon to trek
Forever, however, we are students of
Fearless Professor Rakoff, whom we love.”
