Post date: June 18, 2003
Harvard Law School Professor Martha Minow has received the 2003 Radcliffe Graduate Society Medal. The prize, given to women who have earned a Radcliffe or Harvard Graduate degree and have made an outstanding contribution to their field, was presented to Minow at the Radcliffe Day symposium on June 6.
“It’s a genuine honor to receive this award recognizing my work on the intersecting and sometimes conflicting needs of the individual, the family, and society,” said Minow.
At the symposium, entitled “Women in a Violent World,” Minow offered the examples of “four very different women, in very different worlds. One pursues prosecution. Another presses to reclaim perpetrators if they acknowledge the horror of their acts. A third adds prevention to aid and disregards bureaucratic boundaries. A fourth challenges law enforcement to notice and care. They each teach us to act and think at the same time.”
Minow’s work reaches across domestic and international human rights issues. During the past year, she has served as co-chair of the Nonprofit Scholars Conference on “Crises in Governance” at the Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations, and co-chaired the Justice Welfare and Economic conference on “Human Rights and Welfare Economics.”
A prolific scholar, Minow has published four books in the past year: Partners, Not Rivals; Engaging Cultural Differences (co-edited with Richard Shweder and Hazel Markus); Breaking the Cycles of Hatred; and Imagine Coexistence: Restoring Humanity After Violent Ethnic Conflict (co-edited with Antonia Chayes). In addition, she wrote the lead article in this year’s Harvard Law Review symposium on public values in an era of privatization. Her current research considers the influence of Brown v. Board of Education domestically and on international human rights.
Minow has served on the Harvard Law School faculty since 1981. She currently teaches civil procedure, law and education, and a seminar on nonprofit organizations.
A 1979 graduate of Yale Law School, Minow received her undergraduate degree at the University of Michigan in 1975 and a Master in Education at Harvard in 1976. She was awarded an honorary degree from Wheelock College in 1998.