Civil Rights

This year, as they prepared to graduate, five members of the Class of 2016 took time to reflect on their interests and share experiences they will take from their time at Harvard Law.

Catherine Howard '16 is the winner of the inaugural David A. Grossman Exemplary Clinical Student Award, named in honor of the late professor and public interest lawyer who was dedicated to providing high-quality legal services to low-income communities.

Being Native American defines Elizabeth Reese ’16. Then again, so does being the granddaughter of a Lutheran minister from Pennsylvania. Together, the two have helped shape a woman and a lawyer.

Now in its 14th year, a compact on policing in Cincinnati, Ohio, focused on building strong police-community relationships is a lauded model nationwide. John Cranley ’99, now the city’s mayor, was there from the start of the landmark agreement known as the Collaborative.

Raheemah Abdulaleem ’01 was standing on a Washington, D.C., street corner in 2009 on her way to work at the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division when a man yelled at her from his car to “go back to your country.” An African-American who grew up in Philadelphia in a family whose roots in the United States are nearly as old as the country, Abdulaleem was wearing a hijab, the traditional headscarf worn by some Muslim women.

Bert Rein '64 came to Supreme Court advocacy later in life and has ­focused on litigation challenging race-based protections.

Since graduating from Harvard College in 1985 and then getting his law degree, Alan Jenkins '89 had been on a career fast track, but he felt frustrated about the forces of injustice and inequality he saw around him.

This Spring four members of the Harvard Law School community received the Gary Bellow Public Service Award, established in 2001 in memory of the late Professor Gary Bellow ’60, a pioneering public interest lawyer who founded and directed Harvard Law School’s clinical programs.

In an event at Harvard Law School on March 10, leading feminist scholar Catharine MacKinnon commented on the state of gender equality law in a conversation with Ron Suskind, Pulitzer-winning journalist and lecturer on law at HLS.

Harvard Law student Aya Saed ’17 was among 30 recipients selected to receive the Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowships for New Americans, the premier graduate school fellowship for immigrants and children of immigrants.

Each year, teams of Harvard Law School students are given the opportunity to spend their Spring Break experiencing legal services work with clinics and legal organizations in the Boston area, or working on projects around the country and abroad--here, a few students share their accounts, reflecting on the significance of their service.

As part of the Last Lecture Series presented every year by the HLS Class Marshals, Professor Annette Gordon-Reed ’84 spoke about her experiences combining legal analysis and historical research.

On March 9, as part of the Herbert W. Vaughan series at Harvard Law School, a panel of experts featuring Yuval Levin, founding editor of policy journal National Affairs, discussed the role of religious liberty in modern American life.

This is the last in the Harvard Gazette's series on inequality, one of America’s most vexing problems, examining Harvard’s ground-level efforts to make a difference in the surrounding communities, and beyond.

The Harvard Law School Women’s Law Association 10th annual conference, “What We Talk about When We Talk about Women,” opened with a panel focused on politics.

Earlier this year, Michelle Wu '12 was elected president of the Boston City Council, making her the first Asian American to hold that role. Wu recently spoke with Harvard Law Today about her time at HLS, her experience as a woman in politics, and vision for her new role on the Boston City Council.

The Harvard Corporation has approved the recommendation of the Harvard Law School Shield Committee to retire the HLS shield, which is modeled on the family crest of an 18th century slaveholder.

Harvard Law School hosted the first-ever Legal, Cultural and Strategic Issues in Counterterror Operations Symposium bringing together military officers from the 3rd Legal Operations Detachment and academic scholars whose work focuses on areas of Islamic and human rights law as well as on cultural and international security issues.

Fifth in a Harvard Gazette series on what Harvard scholars are doing to identify and understand inequality, in seeking solutions to one of America’s most vexing problems.

During a talk Monday at Harvard Law School, Sir Hilary Beckles, a distinguished historian, scholar, and activist from Barbados, made the case for reparations, a discussion that has been re-energized in the U.S. by the Black Lives Matter movement .