Legal History

Looking back and ahead with Dean Martha Minow

Martha Minow, Morgan and Helen Chu Dean and Professor at Harvard Law School, was presented with an honorary Doctor of Laws degree from the University of Buenos Aires on May 15. She is the first woman to receive an honorary degree from the University of Buenos Aires.

Klemen Jaklič LL.M. ’00 S.J.D. ’11 has been elected judge of the Constitutional Court of Slovenia by the Slovenian parliament after being nominated by the president of Slovenia earlier this spring. His nine-year term officially started on March 27.

The abrupt firing of FBI Director James Comey has caused much consternation among Democrats and Republicans alike. Alex Whiting, professor of practice at the Law School, spoke with the Harvard Gazette about the ramifications of Comey's dismissal.

The Harvard Law Review has announced the creation of a public interest fellowship, which will enable one recent Harvard Law graduate to spend a year following law school working in public service.

Annette Gordon-Reed’s path to Harvard, where she is the Law School’s Charles Warren Professor of American Legal History and a professor of history in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, is every bit as interesting as her pioneering scholarship.

Harvard Law School Dean Martha Minow has appointed Professor Tomiko Brown-Nagin to be the faculty director of the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice (CHHI) at HLS.

Adriaan Lanni, the Touroff-Glueck Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, has received a 2017 Guggenheim fellowship, an award that honors exceptionally impressive achievement in the past and exceptional promise for future accomplishment.

On March 31, the Harvard Law School Library’s Nuremberg Trials Project announced its selection as a recipient of a Humanities Collections and Reference Resources grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

William T. Coleman Jr. ’46, the former secretary of transportation and one of the lead strategists and co-authors of the legal brief for the appellants in Brown v. Board of Education, died March 31.

In March, speakers at the Harvard Journal on Legislation’s 2017 Symposium, “Legislating on the World Stage,” explored the unique challenges of lawmaking in a context where domestic and international concerns frequently overlap and come into tension with one another.

Over the last decade, Sarah Hurwitz ’04 has managed to produce some of the most memorable and important work as a speechwriter for one of the nation’s most gifted orators, Barack Obama, and two of the world’s most commanding and admired women, Michelle Obama and Hillary Clinton.

The family of the late Antonin Scalia ’60, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, has announced that it will donate his papers to the Harvard Law School Library.

During a recent lecture hosted by the Harvard Law School Forum called “Why Trump? What Now?”, Harvard Professor Michael Sandel took a hard look at Donald Trump’s emerging presidency and the social and economic discontent that put him in office.

Justice Stephen G. Breyer LL.B. ’64 sometimes says that his job and that of other members of the Supreme Court is to speak for the law. He does not mean that justices are Platonic Guardians, with ironclad power to impose their will on the nation despite being unelected. The job calls for deference to the elected branches of government, he emphasizes, and, even more, for caution and doubt. The United States is built on the principles of liberty, he quotes from a famous speech by Judge Learned Hand, and liberty’s spirit is “the spirit which is not too sure that it is right.”

For the first time, Harvard Law School and the MIT Media Lab have collaborated to host an innovative January-term course, “Internet & Society: The Technologies and Politics of Control,” dedicated to understanding the legal and technical dynamics of the digital world.

The Harvard Immigration and Refugee Clinical Program filed an amicus curiae brief on February 16 in the Eastern District of New York case against President Trump’s executive orders on immigration -- one of several cases currently challenging the president’s actions on immigration.

Khizr Khan LL.M. '86, the Gold Star father who gained fame for his speech at the Democratic National Convention, joined HLS Professor Intisar A. Rabb, director of the Islamic Legal Studies Program at Harvard Law School, to discuss civil liberties and political action.

Alexander Acosta, a 1994 graduate of Harvard Law School, is President Donald Trump’s pick as the next Secretary of Labor.

During this year’s spring semester, Mark Tushnet, the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law, is teaching a novel seminar called “Diversity and Social Justice in First Year Classes.” It combines classroom teaching with an eight-part public lecture series examining how issues of diversity and social justice can be integrated into the core 1L classes.

Describing him, among other things, as "a man of enormous achievements," HLS scholars say Supreme Court nominee Neil M. Gorsuch '91 -- selected by President Donald Trump to replace the late Antonin Scalia -- would alter the tone, if not the balance, of the Court, if appointed.