Clinical Practice

As Harvard Law School's Public Service Venture Fund enters its fourth year, HLS is looking back on all that its awardees have accomplished since the first awards were conferred in 2013.

In the Harvard Law class “Spanish for Public Interest Lawyers,” Harvard Law School graduate Joey Michalakes teaches a Spanish course for HLS students who need legal Spanish concepts and terminology to deal with their clients, most of whom speak only Spanish.

On Jan. 3, Harvard Law School's Project on Predatory Student Lending filed a 7.3 billion dollar class action lawsuit in the bankruptcy proceedings of ITT Tech -- one of the country’s largest for-profit college chains -- on behalf of a proposed class of hundreds of thousands of former students.

With just under two weeks left in the presidency of Barack Obama ’91, Deputy Attorney General Sally Q. Yates spoke at Harvard Law School about recent strides in criminal justice reform and why she is optimistic that progress will continue in the new presidential administration.

A look back at 2016, highlights of the people who visited, events that took place and everyday life at Harvard Law School.

In November, the Harvard Negotiation and Mediation Clinical Program celebrated its 10th anniversary, marking its evolution into a robust program of global clinical work in dispute systems design, innovative pedagogy around teamwork, and expanded course offerings in multiparty negotiation, group decision-making, teams and facilitation.

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.

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.

Harvard Law School is pleased to announce that a $1 million gift from Ada Tse ’91 and James Yang through their family’s YangTse Foundation will expand and enhance the Law School’s signature Negotiation Workshop, an intensive course that combines theory and practice to improve students’ understanding of negotiation and their effectiveness as negotiators.

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.

As a child, Raymond Atuguba was regularly confronted by the harsh realities of poverty in Ghana. His father, a civil servant posted to rural areas, owned the only car for miles around. “Every emergency was brought to our door. If the car was not functioning, people died—on a daily basis—because they could not get to the hospital,” recalls Atuguba. “When I grew up, I said, ‘No, this has to change.’”

Military sexual trauma—rape or sexual harassment during military service—is a fast-emerging issue in the nation’s care for veterans and one focus of an HLS clinic.

Harvard Negotiation & Mediation Clinical Program Director and Clinical Professor Robert Bordone and Assistant Director and Lecturer Rachel Viscomi offer advice on how to talk about the election and other contentious topics without alienating family, friends and your social network.

Family, friends, and colleagues of the late Harvard Law School Clinical Professor David Grossman gathered at HLS to celebrate his life, honor his community activism, and support his fight for social justice.

The Center for Health Law and Policy Innovation of Harvard Law School (CHLPI) is undertaking a new advocacy campaign to enforce the health care rights guaranteed by the Affordable Care Act (ACA) for people living with HIV and other chronic conditions.

It took Pedro Spivakovsky-Gonzalez several years and nearly 10,000 miles, on a journey that included several cities around the world, to find his calling in his hometown.

As the final speaker in this year's "Last Lecture" Series was Bob Bordone, Thaddeus R. Beal clinical professor of law and director of the Harvard Negotiation and Mediation Clinical Program, who spoke about a how simple Facebook status update from 2013 led him to consider the elements of a successful career today.

Early in the spring, first-year Harvard Law School students Chloe Goodwin, Nora Ellingsen, and Josh Looney jumped at the opportunity to volunteer with a national organization to help felons get a second shot at life: Clemency Project 2014, a coalition that supports petitions by nonviolent drug offenders for executive clemency.

The Harvard Immigration and Refugee Clinical Program has received a generous grant from the Howard and Abby Milstein Foundation to launch the Syrian Refugee Resettlement Project.

Derek Manners '16 is the winner of the Outstanding Clinical Student Award from the Clinical Legal Education Association (CLEA) of the Association of American Law Schools (AALS). The award is presented annually to one student from each law school for his/her outstanding clinical coursework and contributions to the clinical community.