Family, Gender & Children

A year after Christopher Columbus Langdell assumed the deanship of Harvard Law School in 1870 with the promise of making the school competitive and meritocratic,…

After the release of her article “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All,” Anne-Marie Slaughter ’85 was engulfed in what she calls a “tsunami” of her own making.

What he’ll miss most, what he’ll do next, and the song he can’t get out of his head

Other than their Harvard Law degrees, Naomi Koshi LL.M. ’09 and Karen Freeman-Wilson ’85 don’t appear to have much in common. They live in opposite parts of the world and are different in professional background, ethnicity and age. And yet they share a certain connection. Both were recently elected the first female mayors of cities that are in the middle of their countries and are sometimes overshadowed by their neighbors. The cities are first in their hearts, however—the places where they grew up and which they want to help grow.

Robert McDuff ’80 remembers clearly what first got him thinking about civil rights and the profession of law. In 1968, when he was 12, he read a newspaper account of a murder trial in his hometown of Hattiesburg, Miss. The victim was an African-American shopkeeper and civil rights leader killed by the Klan after he let other other African-Americans use his store as a place to pay their poll taxes.

Harvard Law School S.J.D. candidate Claire Houston has been named a recipient of the Julius B. Richmond Fellowship from the Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University. She will receive a dissertation grant totaling $10,000 from the Center to fund independent research during the 2012-13 academic year. Houston is the first student from HLS to be awarded this honor.

Women played an important role in the Arab Spring revolutions, and their involvement is crucial to the ongoing political change in the region. To that end, the Harvard Law School Women’s Law Association sponsored an event presenting the perspectives of several HLS and Harvard Kennedy School women students from Egypt, Lebanon, and Saudi Arabia. The Women in the Arab Awakening panelists discussed their experiences as both activists in and observers of these events, and the subsequent impact the revolutions have had on women.

During the third week in March, a number of Harvard Law students traveled around the world and to remote areas in the U.S. to offer their legal services. With funding from the Office of Clinical and Pro Bono Programs, teams of students worked with farmers in the Mississippi Delta, immigrants in Alabama and patients living with HIV/AIDS in New Orleans.

On March 6, the husband and wife team of former Virginia Governor Tim Kaine ’83 and First Lady Anne Holton ‘83 gave a talk at Harvard Law School on how to construct a long-term public service career that is able to change and evolve and is meaningful, fun and that allows room for family, friendship, and community involvement.

When the second wave of feminism swept the country in the early 1970s, a woman had never served on the United States Supreme Court. There had never been a woman Secretary of State. If there were any women attorneys general, CEOs, or law school deans, they were rarer than water vapor on the moon. Today, there’s nothing to hold women back. Right? Not so fast. That’s the message delivered by keynote speaker Nancy Gertner to the 300-plus attendees of the National Association of Women Judges’ (NAWJ) conference held at Harvard Law School in mid-March.

As part of the Defending Childhood Task Force, Harvard Law School Professor Charles Ogletree participated in a hearing on March 21 at the University of Miami School of Law, addressing the problem of children’s exposure to community violence.

As youth increasingly turn to the Internet as a source of information, researchers, educators, parents, and policy-makers are faced with mounting challenges and opportunities. A new report from Harvard’s Youth and Media project at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society seeks to understand youths’ real experiences of online information quality.

Pop sensation Lady Gaga launched her anti-bullying, youth-empowering Born This Way Foundation (BTWF) at Sanders Theatre on Wednesday during an Askwith Forum sponsored by the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE). The foundation was established in partnership with HGSE, Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, the John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and the California Endowment. Special guests included Oprah Winfrey, author and speaker Deepak Chopra, U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen G. Sebelius, and Harvard Law School professor Charles J. Ogletree.

Since Matthew Schoenfeld ’12 became president of the Harvard Association of Law and Business last year, it has attracted an impressive array of alumni mentors for students interested in business-related careers. This year, he launched an initiative to raise funds to mentor another group—abused children. This January, Schoenfeld arranged for a partnership between the HALB and the Big Brothers Big Sisters of Massachusetts, to raise money for children in need of mentorship due to abusive situations and child welfare intervention.

On Feb. 1, the Harvard Law School Federalist Society sponsored a debate on the philosophical and legal issues surrounding the field of embryonic research. The event, “Embryo Ethics and the Law,” featured Christopher Tollefsen, a philosophy professor at the University of South Carolina, and HLS Assistant Professor Glenn Cohen, co-director of the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School.

On February 3, the Harvard Women’s Law Association held its 6th annual conference. This year’s conference, entitled “Mind the Gap: Achieving Actual Parity,” was an open forum about achieving equality in the courtroom, workplace, and community. Kamala Harris, Attorney General of California, delivered the keynote address. 

There are two things former U.S. Solicitor General Paul Clement ’92 won’t do: Tell you where he stands on same-sex marriage, and grouse about the controversy that enveloped him last spring when he resigned from his law firm in order to continue defending U.S. House of Representatives Republicans in litigation over the Defense of Marriage Act.

The Metropolitan Area Planning Council (MAPC) has released a summary of “The State of Equity in Metro Boston,” a report studying the ways that inequity affects the residents of greater Boston. The full report was released on Tuesday, Dec. 13 at an event co-hosted by Harvard Law School’s Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice.

Six Harvard Law School students and recent graduates have been chosen to receive Skadden Fellowships to support their work in public service.