Civil Rights

Last year, HLS Professor Jon Hanson and Jacob Lipton ’14 launched the Systemic Justice Project, a new venture intended to provide students with a new way to think about the role that law and lawyers play in society.

"Powering the African Dream," a two-day series of roundtable discussions on the role of African women in in the United Nations' post-2015 Development Agenda and the Beijing +20 Review Process, was held at Harvard Law School on March 9-10.

On March 6, Harvard Law School’s Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice hosted Dying While Black and Brown, a dance performance focused on capital punishment and the disproportionate numbers of incarcerated people of color. The performance was first commissioned by the San Francisco Equal Justice Society as part of the society’s campaign to restore 14th Amendment protections for victims of discrimination, including those on death row.

National concerns over racial justice lead to campus introspection, discussion, research, and action They are short, stark sentences, seared into the public consciousness in recent…

In a recent Q&A in the New York Times, Harvard Law School Professor Lani Guinier discusses her new book, "The Tyranny of the Majority: Fundamental Fairness in Representative Democracy" in which she argues for a rethinking of merit, typically measured by standardized test scores, that would better reflect the values of a democratic society.

Harvard Law School Senior Lecturer on Law and retired federal judge Nancy Gertner will receive the New England First Amendment Coalition's 2015 Stephen Hamblett Award, named after the late publisher of The Providence Journal and given each year to an individual who has promoted, defended or advocated for the First Amendment.

On Friday, Feb. 6, after several town hall meetings in which Harvard Law students and faculty shared their experiences and observations of discrimination and systemic injustice, as well as hopes for pedagogical and cultural shifts at the law school, the HLS community convened to discuss a somewhat more familiar law school topic: legal and policy reforms.

HLS Professor Carol Steiker is using her year as the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study’s Rita E. Hauser Fellow to work with her brother and frequent collaborator, Jordan M. Steiker, on a book about the past half-century’s experiment with the constitutional regulation of capital punishment in America. She recently spoke with the Harvard Gazette about the history and future of the death penalty in the United States.

And discussions have continued into the new year about the policy and procedures of police, prosecutors and the community at large.

A former NBA All Star turned humanitarian. Supreme Court justices. Student protests. Take a look at some highlights of the people who visited and events that took place this semester at Harvard Law School.

In an op-ed in the Boston Globe, “Trust in the legal system must be regained,” Harvard Law School Dean Martha Minow and Yale…

At a time when policing, prosecutorial discretion, the death penalty, and criminal justice as a whole are under tremendous scrutiny in the United States, a new initiative at Harvard Law School seeks to analyze problems within the U.S. criminal justice system and look for solutions.

At the inaugural Disabled American Veterans Distinguished Speaker Series at Harvard Law School, U.S. Secretary of Veterans Affairs Robert McDonald said the troubled agency is making progress in getting its house in order, citing more — and more timely — appointments and authorizations to see private doctors for veterans who live far from VA hospitals.

Until last spring, scores of destitute people—virtually all of them African-Americans—were locked up in the city jail of Montgomery, Alabama, for traffic tickets they couldn’t pay, sentenced to a day in jail for every $50 they owed. They could earn a $25 credit daily by providing free labor, scrubbing blood and feces off jail floors and cleaning buildings.

Laurence Tribe discusses some of the implications of the decisions of nine men and women with regard to gay marriage, gun rights, N.S.A. surveillance, health care, emerging threats to privacy, immigration and more.

Twenty-two years. That’s how long Tom Mela ’68 and his colleagues fought the Boston Public Schools in a class-action lawsuit over huge backlogs in providing special education to students with disabilities.

Benjamin B. Ferencz ’43, known for his role as chief prosecutor in the Nuremburg Trials and for his work promoting an international rule of law and the creation of an International Criminal Court, has been awarded Harvard Law School’s highest honor: the Medal of Freedom.