Civil Rights

For Duckenfield, it was about learning about the past but also connecting it to the present. The people buried in these cemeteries deserve respect and attention, he says—no different from African Americans living now whose stories are often unknown and unseen by the larger population.

In an effort to combat multiple potential vectors of attack on the 2020 U.S. election, two Berkman Klein Center affiliates have published a package of “tabletop exercises,” freely available to decisionmakers and the public to simulate realistic scenarios in which disinformation threatens to disrupt the 2020 election.

Harvard Law School’s Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race & Justice recently co-authored amicus curiae briefs in two Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court cases with significant impact on racial profiling.

The Harvard Gazette recently asked Oneida Indian Nation Visiting Professor of Law Robert Anderson, and other members of the Harvard community, “Is this the end of Columbus Day, and how can America best replace it?” 

This Saturday, October 3, 2020, the Systemic Justice Project at Harvard Law School and the Thurgood Marshall Civil Rights Center at Howard University School of Law will launch a year-long pilot project called “The Justice Initiative” with the first of 10, three-hour programming sessions.

“Racial Equality?,” a new year-long lecture series organized by Professors Randall Kennedy and Annette Gordon-Reed ’84, aims to address some of these acute issues with a wider lens that investigates both the paths to—and potential manifestations of—racial equality.

The late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was enrolled at HLS from 1956 to 1958. In the years since, Ginsburg returned to Harvard Law School many times.

In the first of a seven-part series about policing in America, experts discuss how this moment may be an inflection point.

The Human Rights Program launches a series of talks exploring issues of racial justice and human rights. The inaugural event, “Advocating While Black,” takes place on Sept. 24 .

In the first colloquium of a sweeping new series, “COVID-19 and the Law,” five Harvard Law faculty members grappled with the challenges, limitations, and opportunities of governmental powers during a public health crisis.

Sonne, who founded a similar program at Stanford, discusses the importance of representing vulnerable, marginalized, and underrepresented clients and communities.

Two clinics at HLS— the Cyberlaw Clinic and the Harvard Immigration and Refugee Clinic—partner on a case involving warrantless device searches at the U.S. border

After a health scare, William D. Zabel ’61 reflects on a life and career of making a difference for society and his clients—with more to come.

On August 3, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit vacated a trial court judgment that had been entered in favor of Bolivia’s former president, Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada, and former defense minister, José Carlos Sánchez Berzaín, for the massacre of unarmed Indigenous people in 2003.

The November 2020 general election was shaping up to be one of the most highly anticipated, nerve-wracking and deeply contested elections in American history, with most onlookers expecting record-breaking voter turnout. Then a pandemic hit.

Harvard Law School student Sarah Rutherford ’21 recently co-founded Black Bakers for Black Lives, an initiative to raise money for, and awareness of, organizations fighting for racial justice.

A new report from Boston University confirms the transformational benefits of a trauma-sensitive school culture as developed by the Trauma and Learning Policy Initiative at HLS.

PLAP students secure release of two prisoners with mental disabilities, and set new judicial precedent under the Americans with Disabilities Act

In the wake of the killing of George Floyd, legal scholars see a moment of reckoning.

Andrew Crespo ’08 recently discussed the federal government’s law enforcement actions in Portland, Oregon with Harvard Law Today.

Deirde Mask ’07, author of “The Address Book: What Street Addresses Reveal About Identity, Race, Wealth, and Power” illuminates the richness and history behind the seemingly prosaic numbers and names that mark the places in our lives in her book and talks about how the books came to be.