Civil Rights

Years of advocacy by Harvard Law School’s Immigration and Refugee Clinical Program have culminated in a landmark decision recognizing gender as basis for asylum claims.

Student fellows at the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics recently celebrated their fellowships’ end virtually when their capstone meeting moved to Zoom due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Lila Fenwick ’56 was a student at Harvard Law School in 1954 when the Supreme Court decision in Brown v.  Board of Education came down. “I was delirious,” recalled Fenwick, one of only a handful of women students at HLS at the time and the only black woman among them.

At a March 27 Petrie-Flom event on medical debt and universal health coverage, health experts and journalists raise serious concerns about the affordability of testing and hospital care.

Martha Minow shared her thoughts on the subject of law and forgiveness, a focus of her most recent scholarship at TEDWomen, an annual conference that highlights the contributions and ideas of notable women across a number of fields.

In a Q&A, scholars at the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School raise important legal and ethical questions about health care delivery and the enactment of extraordinary public health measures in response to the ongoing epidemic.

As federal and state governments take measures to curtail public activity during the COVID-19 outbreak, Charles Fried and Nancy Gertner agree that the restriction on individual freedom is largely appropriate for the circumstance.

This month, Harvard Law Professors Jim Greiner and I. Glenn Cohen teamed up with bioethics scholar Holly Fernandez Lynch to author “Overcoming obstacles to experiments in legal practice,” in which the collaborators argue in favor of randomized studies in legal research over the common practice of relying on the expertise and judgment of individuals.

Noah Feldman and Richard Lazarus ’79 discuss public health and civil liberties in the time of COVID-19 on Feldman's Deep Background podcast.

To commemorate International Women’s Day, a team of experts met at Harvard Law School on March 9 to trace the history of the Equal Rights Amendment to date, and to argue for its importance going forward.

The Harvard Law School Human Rights Program welcomed government officials, medical experts, legal scholars, and human rights activists from around the world to Cambridge on Feb. 28 for a global consultation on practices of so-called “conversion therapy” to which lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and gender diverse persons are subjected around the world.

During Winter Term, 12 Harvard Law School students traveled to 12 countries as Cravath International Fellows to pursue clinical placements or independent research with an international, transnational, or comparative law focus.

For the fourth consecutive year, the Asian Pacific American Law Students Association (APALSA) welcomed the Honorable Judge Denny Chin of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit for a reenactment of a key trial that shaped Asian American history.

Harvard Law School has launched a new Religious Freedom Clinic. The clinic joins the 46 legal clinics and student practice organizations that make up the school’s clinical program.

Harvard Law School has launched a new Voting Rights Litigation and Advocacy Clinic. The clinic joins the 46 legal clinics and student practice organizations that make up the school’s clinical program.

Professors Annette Gordon-Reed, Kenneth Mack and David Wilkins discuss the Harvard Law School's first black graduates and the legacy of African Americans at HLS throughout the years.

“Just Mercy,” the film based on the memoir by Bryan Stevenson ’85, ends with a sobering statistic: For every nine people executed in the U.S., one on death row is exonerated. As Professor Carol Steiker noted in a discussion following a screening of the film, that makes the U.S. No. 1 in a problematic category.

The Harvard Law School Library has announced the public release of the first batch of papers and other items from the Antonin Scalia Collection. His papers were donated by the Scalia family following the influential justice's death in 2016.

Effective Jan. 1, three faculty members were promoted and two new scholars joined the HLS faculty.

Eloise Lawrence, a community lawyering advocate, was named assistant clinical professor of law at Harvard Law School and deputy faculty director of the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau.