Family, Gender & Children

Harvard Law School Dean Martha Minow, who serves on the board of directors for the Legal Services Corporation (LSC), was selected as co-chair of an LSC task force to develop additional resources to help low-income Americans facing serious civil legal problems.

Harvard Law School Professor Noah Feldman explained aspects of Sharia and Islam Law on a television program -- "Unwelcome: The Muslims Next Door" -- for CNN's In America series.The segment, which examines a Tennessee city torn apart as residents fight to block the construction of a large Islamic center, is part of a broadcast that will air on Saturday, April 2 at 8:00 p.m.

Harvard Law School Dean and Jeremiah Smith, Jr. Professor of Law Martha L. Minow delivered the annual Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg Distinguished Lecture on Women and the Law, sponsored by the New York City Bar Association, on February 7. The title of the talk was “Gender and the Law Stories: Learning from Longstanding Debates.”

For the third year in a row, Harvard Law School has won the Northeast Black Law Students Association’s Trial Advocacy competition. HLS sent two teams to the competition this year, and, for the second consecutive year, HLS took both first and second place.

African-American children, who account for just 15 percent of all children in the U.S., represent more than a third of children placed in foster care. The question is: Why? That controversial issue and others surrounding society’s efforts to protect children were the focus of the conference “Race & Child Welfare: Disproportionality, Disparity, Discrimination: Re-Assessing the Facts, Re-Thinking the Policy Options,” held January 28-29 at Harvard Law School.

The continuing debate over Brown v. Board of Education's effects was forcefully illustrated on Tuesday, Sept. 28, by a panel discussion of Harvard Law School Dean Martha Minow’s new book, “In Brown’s Wake: Legacies of America’s Educational Landmark,” the first in a series of events on faculty-authored books sponsored by the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice and HLS.

Harvard Law School Dean Martha Minow wrote the post “Charter schools and integration” for the law blog 'Balkinization'.

A U.N. advocate is fighting to protect children from armed conflicts

The article “Don’t accept injustice,” by Harvard Law School Professor Anne Alstott, appeared in the July/August 2010 edition of the Boston Review.

For ten of thousands of young people, childhood can consist of a pipeline to prison. On Thursday, April 29, 2010, the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice at Harvard Law School hosted a conference addressing the issue locally: “Coming Together to Dismantle the Cradle to Prison Pipeline in Massachusetts: A Half-Day Summit of Community, Faith and Policy Leaders.”

Harvard Law School students participating in this year’s Supreme Court Litigation Clinic wound up winning a hat trick this year, with the Supreme Court ruling in their favor in all three cases in which the clinic’s students were involved.  

Lisa Kelly LL.M. ’08 was recently awarded a Trudeau Foundation Doctoral Scholarship. Annually, 15 doctoral candidates are awarded up to $180,000 each over a three-year period to support research “of compelling present-day concern” to the Trudeau Foundation, which was established in 2001 to honor the former prime minister of Canada.

Jeannie Suk, an assistant professor of law at Harvard Law School, has been awarded the Herbert Jacob Prize for her book, “At Home in the Law,” by the Law and Society Association. The prize, awarded for the most outstanding book in law and society of the year, was presented to Suk at the Association’s annual meeting in Chicago on May 29.

"Suspending Adoption Is Not the Answer," an op-ed by HLS Professor Elizabeth Bartholet, faculty director of the Child Advocacy Program (CAP) at Harvard Law School, was published in the New York Times 'Room for Debate' blog on Apr. 15. Bartholet also appeared on NPR's 'On Point with Tom Ashbrook' to discuss the increased scrutiny on international adoption in light of the recent story about a 7-year-old Russian boy sent back to Moscow alone by his adoptive mother. 

On March 8, Associate Attorney General Tom Perrelli ’91 returned to Harvard Law School to discuss the Department of Justice’s new violence against women initiative. Perrelli’s visit marked the first stop on a month-long college campus tour sponsored by DOJ.

Advocacy and litigation on behalf of women’s interests has expanded the rights and protections available to women, according to a group of panelists assembled for a recent women’s law conference, “Women for Women: Advocating for Change,” hosted by the HLS Women’s Law Association at Harvard Law on Feb. 19.

“Put children’s safety first,” an op-ed by Harvard Law School Professor Elizabeth Bartholet ’65 about the adoption crisis in the wake of the Haiti earthquake, appeared in the Feb. 1 edition of the New York Times Room for Debate Blog.

It’s Tuesday afternoon in a Pound Hall classroom. The Socratic method is in use, and the class is engaged. But the professor is a Harvard Law student and he is teaching 13 teenagers—all involved in the juvenile justice system.