Civil Rights

During the fall 2016 semester, a group of leading scholars came together at Harvard Law School for the lecture series, "Diversity and US Legal History," which was sponsored by Dean Martha Minow and organized by Professor Mark Tushnet, who also designed a reading group to complement the lectures.

On November 9, 2016, the Honorable Robert Russell, founder of the nation’s first Veterans Treatment Court delivered the 2016 DAV Distinguished Speaker Lecture at Harvard Law School.

Harvard Law School Dean Martha Minow was recently named a fellow of the American Academy of Political and Social Science (AAPSS), one of the nation’s oldest learned societies. Minow was one of five distinguished scholars elected as fellows of the Academy in 2017.

Harvard Law School's International Human Rights Clinic has released a new report, "Securing Status: Syrian refugees and the documentation of legal status, identity, and family relationships in Jordan," that details the challenges Syrian refugees living outside refugee camps encounter obtaining official documents from the Government of Jordan.

This fall, Harvard Law School lecturer Nancy Gertner, Harvard sociologist Bruce Western and Vincent Schiraldi, senior research fellow and director of the Harvard Kennedy School’s Program in Criminal Justice Policy and Management, are teaching a new Harvard course that will help students become part of the effort to reform the nation’s criminal justice system.

The American Law Institute has elected HLS Professors Kenneth Mack ‘91 and William Rubenstein ’86 as members.

A photo exhibit featuring portraits of legal scholars who represent traditionally marginalized voices will be displayed in Harvard Law School’s Wasserstein Hall from Nov. 17-22.

In October, Kristin Fleschner ’14 returned to the Harvard Law campus to share with current students her work in disability rights and her experiences as a blind lawyer. Her talk was followed by a showing of “Blind Ambition,” a documentary that she produced as a 2L with the support of the Dean of Students Office.

HLS students Tony Garofano LL.M. ’17 and Sarah Grant ’19 spoke with writers for Harvard Law Today about their experiences serving in the military and studying at Harvard Law.

Janet Reno ’63, the longest serving U.S. attorney general of the 20th century and the first woman to have ever held the post, died on Monday at age 78. Reno was nominated to the post of U.S. Attorney General by President Clinton in 1993 and she served for eight years, before stepping down in 2001.

It’s been eight years since Massachusetts voters decriminalized the possession of one ounce or less of marijuana. On Tuesday, they’ll decide whether to tax and regulate the sale and adult consumption of it. The initiative, known as Question 4, would legalize and create a commission to regulate marijuana in Massachusetts.

In the summer of 2016, 19 students traveled to 13 countries through the Chayes International Public Service Fellowship Program. Chayes Fellows spend eight weeks working within the governments of developing nations, or with the inter-governmental and non-governmental organizations that support them.

Even when he was 5, Joel Motley '78 knew his late mother was doing important work; now, he has co-produced "The Trials of Constance Baker Motley," a short film about the woman who became the first black female Manhattan borough president, New York state senator, and federal judge.

In late October Harvard Law School celebrated National Pro Bono Week with a number of events to honor the outstanding work of lawyers who volunteer their time to help people in their communities.

HLS Professor Charles Ogletree ’78 announced this summer that he has been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease and said he will work to raise awareness of the disease and its disproportionate effect on African-Americans. In sharing his story and putting a spotlight on this disease, he is continuing his lifelong efforts to help others.

HLS hosted the fourth Celebration of Black Alumni in September, featuring the theme “Turning Vision into Action.” The actions of alumni who attended have resonated in courtrooms and classrooms, in elected office and the corner office, in communities and in the culture. The Bulletin spoke with five CBA participants about where their vision has led them and where they hope to yet go.

James Alan McPherson ’68 grew up in poverty in segregated Georgia, and went on to write short fiction and essays that deftly explore race, class and community and what it means to be human. He was the first black author to receive the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

Not everyone at the Harvard Law School in the mid to late 1960s understood that a student named James Alan McPherson—a young African-American man who would later go on to be the first in our class to receive a McArthur “genius” grant—was in fact a genius.

Earlier this month, Harvard Law School’s Royall Professor of Law, Janet Halley, took first-year HLS students in her Reading Group on the Law School’s connection to New England’s slavery heritage to visit the Royall House and Slave Quarters in Medford, Massachusetts.

As part of Boston’s HUBweek, HLS Clinical Professor Susan Crawford addressed a gathering of more than 100 people and made the case for her new Responsive Communities Initiative, a three-pronged program aimed at addressing issues of social justice, civil liberties, and economic development involving high-speed Internet access and government use of data.

Last spring, the Criminal Justice Policy Program developed an initiative to provide representation to incarcerated people petitioning President Obama for clemency. Twenty-six Harvard Law students volunteered to work with a team of pro bono attorneys to represent clemency petitioners, in what has become the largest law student-based clemency initiative in the country.