Family, Gender & Children

Professor Heather Gerken says it can.

Katherine Locker '98 knows that children with disabilities who are in the foster care system are some of the most vulnerable people on the planet.

Sometimes making the greatest impact on a student's life is as simple as changing his fifth-grade homeroom. That's what Marina Volanakis '99 did for 10-year-old Gabriel, and it was enough to turn him from a disrespectful troublemaker into a dedicated student.

The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court decision in Goodridge v. Department of Public Health last fall has allowed gay marriage in the commonwealth--at least for now.

In their new book, Professor Elizabeth Warren and her daughter reveal the diminishing fortunes of middle-class families and show a way out of the "Two-Income Trap."

Participants in the school's first GLBT reunion recount the changes in their lives and on campus.

The year 1989 wound down with the law school being painfully reminded that its portrait collection was still conspicuously all male.

There's nothing noteworthy about being a female student at Harvard Law School today: About half of the students are women.

In her new book, Judith Richards Hope details the struggles and successes of the women classmates who "took the place of a man."

For many years after HLS began admitting women, male faculty still predominated. That's changed, and women faculty members talk about what their presence has meant for the school and for themselves.

Fifty years after the first women graduated from Harvard Law School, alumnae come together to look back at the progress and ahead to the possibilities.

The urinal is the political. So are the toilet and the condom dispenser and the diaper changing station and everything else commonly found in men's and women's rooms (and even the fact that there are men's and women's rooms).

Known for her tart tongue and her tears (when she announced that she wouldn't run for president in 1988), Patricia Schroeder knew how to get things done in Congress, including the passage of the Family and Medical Leave Act.

Cynics call them do-gooders, hopelessly naïve people disconnected from the real world. These days, the cynical view could easily prevail.

Do you expect Harvard Law women to be card-carrying liberals? Then you haven't met Cameron Casey '03 or other members of the Alliance of Independent Feminists.

Sometimes a painting is not just a work of art. That's the case with the most recent addition to the HLS collection, praised not only for its style but for all it represents.

Eugene Wade graduated from Morehouse College, Harvard Law School, and the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School. But he almost flunked out of high school. And that experience drove him to start his own charter school company, helping kids like himself--poor minority children in inner cities.

After an editor at Oxford University Press read Unbending Gender, a book her own company published, she quit her job. In a way, it was the ultimate compliment for the author, Joan Williams '80, a professor at American University's Washington College of Law.

Credit: Christoph Niemann Frederick F. Greenman Jr. ’61 LL.M. ’63 fights for a right almost everyone takes for granted. All people, he believes, should be…

As her tenure as head of the Justice Department ends, Janet Reno '63 reflects on the criticism and controversies--and what she did with her Harvard Law School education.

Credit: Richard Chase A fellow at HLS during the academic year, Jennifer Braceras ’94, argued the conservative’s case as a columnist for the Boston Glove…

Despite today's booming economy, the number of middle-class families filing for bankruptcy in America is soaring, according to Professor Elizabeth Warren, Teresa Sullivan, and Jay Westbrook, coauthors of a new study, The Fragile Middle Class: Americans in Debt (Yale University Press, 2000).

The Bulletin interviews Elizabeth Bartholet about her recent book, which looks at how policies affect children victimized by abuse and neglect.

Professor Lucie White’s spring seminar Child Care, Development, Policy, and Women’s Work: Comparative Perspectives culminated in a late-April colloquium that brought together scholars, activists, and students for discussion of emerging issues involving women’s employment, social justice movements, and state policy regarding the unpaid or undercompensated care-taking —especially of young children—that women typically do.