Human Rights

Last spring, the Criminal Justice Policy Program developed an initiative to provide representation to incarcerated people petitioning President Obama for clemency. Twenty-six Harvard Law students volunteered to work with a team of pro bono attorneys to represent clemency petitioners, in what has become the largest law student-based clemency initiative in the country.

The Child Advocacy Program (CAP) of Harvard Law School recently received a $250,000 gift from Children of All Nations (CAN). The gift, which will be distributed over five years, will provide funding to CAP to pursue its international human rights work on behalf of unparented children and their right to family.

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.

Harvard Law School’s Criminal Justice Policy Program and the National Consumer Law Center (NCLC) have released Confronting Criminal Justice Debt: A Comprehensive Project for Reform, a collaborative project that focuses on the financial costs of the criminal justice system.

In commemoration of the 15th anniversary of 9/11, Harvard Law School Dean Martha Minow asked faculty, alumni and staff to share brief personal reflections about that day and the post-9/11 world in which we live.

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.

Accepting the Daniel P.S. Paul Constitutional Law chair, Tomiko Brown-Nagin delivered a lecture titled, "On Being First: Judge Constance Baker Motley and Social Activism in the American Century," which focused on 20th century social reform through the life of the civil rights advocate who became the first female African American federal judge in 1966.

Chayes Fellow Michael Jung ’18 recently wrote about his experience working with UNICEF in Bangkok, Thailand, researching and gaining an overview of the current and future landscape of juvenile justice in the region.

Harvard Law 3Ls Andrea Clay and Sam Koplewicz are two of the student filmmakers with the Harvard Law Documentary Studio ('Doc Studio'), a student organization that aims to produce original documentaries that explore social and policy issues.

"Advancing human rights and social justice has been a primary concern of mine for decades," said Lynn Savarese. "The three years spent at HLS focusing on fairness in myriad complex contexts helped fuel and shape this endeavor."

Food recovery entrepreneurs, farmers, business persons, academics, government officials and many others converged at Harvard Law School for two days of learning, strategizing, and networking to address the growing issue of food waste.

HLS Professors Tomiko Brown-Nagin and Jonathan Zittrain ’95 have been elected members of the American Law Institute--the leading independent organization in the United States producing scholarly work to clarify, modernize, and improve the law.

The Coalition to Transform Advanced Care (C-TAC), a non-profit organization with a vision of improving advanced illness care for all Americans, and the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School co-hosted the inaugural event for their new collaboration: The Project on Advanced Care and Health Policy.

In his role at the HLS Library, Matt Seccombe spends much of his day sorting through roughly a million pages of horror, analyzing documents in the HLS Library’s Nuremberg Trials Collection—one of the most extensive collections in the world of documents from the trials of military and political leaders of Nazi Germany and other accused war criminals.

Charles Ogletree '78, the Jesse Climenko Professor of Law and director of the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race & Justice at Harvard Law School, recently announced that he has been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. He said he will work to raise awareness of the disease and its disproportionate effect on African Americans.

More than 125,000 veterans who have served since 9/11 are denied access to basic services like health care by the Department of Veterans Affairs, according to a report by the Veterans Legal Clinic at the Legal Services Center of Harvard Law School.

In a Q&A with the Harvard Gazette, Professor Ron Sullivan discusses the shooting deaths last week of two black men in Louisiana and Minnesota at the hands of police, and the subsequent killing of five Dallas officers by a retaliating sniper, events that shocked the nation and left many feeling like the country is unraveling.

Harvard Law School’s Criminal Justice Policy Program has received a generous grant from the Laura and John Arnold Foundation to support the program’s work to advance reform of unfair policies that allow for imposing fees and fines in the criminal justice system.

Deborah Anker and Phil Torrey weigh in on the 4-4 Supreme Court tie that dealt a major blow to President Obama’s executive actions to grant relief from deportation to undocumented immigrants living in the U.S.--putting, according to Anker, 'hundreds of thousands of people at risk of deportation, including parents of U.S. citizens or legal residents.'

Brett Dakin '03, a 2001 Chayes International Public Service Fellow and currently the general counsel at the Child Mind Institute in New York, returned to HLS this spring to talk with recent Chayes Fellows about his fellowship experience and his career path since graduating from HLS.