Civil Rights

Tom Perez M.P.P./J.D. ’87, former Secretary of Labor under President Obama and the current chair of the Democratic National Committee. At the John T. Dunlop Memorial Forum Lecture at Harvard Law School on Feb. 6, Perez addressed the future of organized labor and the challenges of income inequality in the United States.

The Harvard Asian Pacific American Law Students Association (APALSA) performed “Heart Mountain: Conscience, Loyalty and the Constitution” on Feb. 3, an acclaimed reenactment of the trials and the events surrounding the internment and drafting of Japanese-Americans during the Second World War.

Kristin Turner ’17 was selected as the recipient of Harvard Law School's Public Welfare Foundation A2J Tech Fellowship. She will spend year working with Upsolve, a nonprofit that has developed a platform designed to guide both debtors and attorneys through the Chapter 7 bankruptcy process.

On Jan. 5, New England Patriots Defensive Captain Devin McCourty, teammates Johnson Bademosi, Matthew Slater and Duron Harmon, and team president Jonathan Kraft participated in a 'Listen and Learn' event at HLS, organized by the Fair Punishment Project and the Office of Public Interest Advising, featuring panel discussions on inequities in the criminal justice system.

On Saturday, November 20, family, friends, students, and colleagues of the late Harvard Law School Clinical Professor David Grossman gathered at HLS to celebrate his life, honor his community activism, and support his fight for social justice at the second annual David A Grossman (DAG) Fund fundraiser.

In this three-part lecture, Professor Randall Kennedy draws on a course he teaches in Race Relations Law to discuss the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

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.

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.

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

Julian SpearChief-Morris ’17 is the first indigenous student to lead the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau, marking his place in the storied history of the bureau which was founded in 1913 to provide legal services to low-income clients in the Boston area.

Panelists at an HLS in the World seminar called “No Justice for Most: Brainstorming New and Old Ideas for Government, Professional, and Technological Solutions,” discussed the disparity in legal services available in urban and rural areas and other barriers to access to justice.

As part of Harvard Law School's bicentennial summit, a panel, “Special Prosecutors and Independent Counsels: Investigating the White House and the President of the United States,” gathered six Harvard alumni and faculty members who’ve been involved with nearly every high-profile investigation, from Watergate to Whitewater, to the leaking of Valerie Plame’s identity.

Each year, as we honor military veterans nationwide for their service, Harvard Law Today profiles students in the incoming class who have held positions in the Armed Forces. The Class of 2020 includes the largest number of former or current service members in Harvard Law's recent history.

As a JAG officer in the U.S. Marine Corps for more than six years, Jenna E. Reed LL.M. ’18 prosecuted and defended some of the most serious cases in that branch of the military, focusing on violent and special victims crimes, including shaken-baby cases and others involving children.

In becoming a Marine and then a lawyer, Nathan Garrett Jester ’20 is interested in someday going into local or state politics in his home state of Georgia, to serve the community where he was born and raised.

Steven Kerns ’20 was a high school dropout, a self-described ‘rebel without a cause’ from Long Beach, Calif., when he joined the U.S. Army as a teenager looking for adventure, with vague notions of changing the world.

As part of Harvard Law School's bicentennial summit, former Attorney General of the United States Loretta Lynch ’84 and Charles Warren Professor of American Legal History at Harvard Law School Annette Gordon-Reed ’84 looked back on their time together at Harvard Law School and discussed their subsequent careers.

Over a year ago, a group of students in Harvard Law School's Criminal Justice Policy Program (CJPP) began working to propel forensic science reform in Massachusetts. On Oct. 2, the students' work culminated in a Wrongful Conviction Day event at the Massachusetts State House.