Human Rights

At HLS in the Arts this past weekend, Paola Eisner ’19 exhibited a large still life that she painted before she went to college, and pages from a children’s book that she began working on before she started law school. Like these, many of the interests and projects that she pursues today have deeper roots.

Jason Corral, staff attorney, Harvard Immigration and Refugee Clinical program, participated in a panel discussion at Harvard Kennedy School’s Institute of Politics on the Trump administration's recent announcement that it intended to upend the Deferred Action on Childhood Arrivals program.

To officially open Harvard Law School’s Bicentennial celebration, a panel of Harvard Law School faculty members gathered on Sept. 5 to discuss the law school’s early history.

A typical Harvard Law School student has limited free time. It might be filled with journal work, or student practice organizations, or intramural sports. For a year, Crispin Smith ’18, Nick Gersh ’18, and Ahsan Sayed ’18 spent their free moments exploring the successes and challenges facing religious and ethnic minorities in Iraqi Kurdistan on behalf of the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom.

On Sept. 5, at the opening of its Bicentennial observance, Harvard Law School unveiled a memorial to the enslaved people whose labor helped make possible the founding of the school.

The Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race & Justice at Harvard Law School joined forces with the ACLU of Massachusetts to host a daylong conference at Harvard Law School in June, titled “Redefining the Role of the Prosecutor within the Community.”

On Sept. 15, 2017, Professor Joseph Singer ’81 was among the artists who showcased their talents during an evening of performances at HLS in the Arts, one of several events that celebrated the 200th anniversary of the founding of Harvard Law School.

In early 2014, Alec Karakatsansis, ’08, used some of the money that he and a Harvard Law School classmate had recently received from the school’s Public Service Venture Fund seed grant to buy a plane ticket to Birmingham, Alabama, and rent a car.

Harvard Law School Professor and former Dean Martha Minow delivered a keynote address at Newport's Touro Synagogue. The Aug. 20 event commemorated the 70th public rereading of George Washington's letter to the Jewish community promising that the country would give “bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance."

In a three-part lecture, Martha Minow, Carter Professor of General Jurisprudence and Harvard University Distinguished Service Professor, discusses the legacies of Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark 1954 civil rights case in which the Supreme Court declared state laws concerning the segregation of public schools to be unconstitutional.

In June, the Harvard Law School’s Veterans Legal Clinic filed a class action lawsuit in Massachusetts Superior Court on behalf of Army combat veteran Jeffrey Machado and an estimated 4,000 veterans from Massachusetts who have served abroad since 9/11, but deemed ineligible to receive the state’s $1000 Welcome Home Bonus for honorably discharged servicemembers.

Legal scholars from across the globe gathered at HLS in July for a two-day conference on law and development, the latest iteration of a series of conferences held periodically by a loose consortium of schools including Harvard Law School, the University of Geneva, Renmin University of China, and the University of Sydney, Australia.

For more than a half-century at HLS, Professor Emeritus Henry Steiner ’55 has focused on international human rights, including as the founder of the school’s Human Rights Program; he has also focused his camera on countries around the world, and is now sharing his deep passion for photography in a new book, “Eyeing the World.”

In a victory for Harvard Law School’s Crimmigration Clinic, the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts ruled that state authorities cannot detain someone for a U.S. immigration violation based solely on a Detainer.

President Donald J. Trump has appointed Anthony Scaramucci ’89 to serve as White House communications director, upping by one the number of Harvard Law School alumni tapped to serve in the administration since Trump’s inauguration.

This spring, the Harvard Law Bulletin spoke with Professor of Practice Naz Modirzadeh, founding director of the HLS’ Program on International Law and Armed Conflict (PILAC) and co-author of the report “Indefinite War: Unsettled International Law on the End of Armed Conflict,” about the failure of international law to provide guidance on war’s end.

Over the course of her career, as Bonnie Docherty ’01 has emerged as an international expert on civilian protection in armed conflict, she has also mentored scores of clinical students, from field researchers in conflict zones to advocates inside the halls of the U.N. in Geneva.

Harvard Law School has announced that the family of the late Samuel Pisar LL.M. ’55 S.J.D. ’59, has endowed a professorship and a fund to support the International Human Rights Clinic.

Drawing on his interests in constitutional law, constitutional history, and racial equality, Professor Michael Klarman’s Last Lecture explored the obstacles faced — and in many ways, overcome — by feminist lawyers and African-American civil rights lawyers in the middle of the last century.

A sharp increase in web encryption and a worldwide shift away from standalone websites in favor of social media and online publishing platforms has altered the practice of state-level internet censorship and in some cases led to broader crackdowns, a new study by the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University finds.

In May 2017, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court extended the American with Disabilities Act to mentally and physically disabled prisoners seeking parole, ruling that the state must help them get support systems in place in the community—thanks to years of work by students with Harvard's Prison Legal Assistance Project.