Legal History

With the U.S. presidential election weeks away, Harvard Law Today offers a look back at what scholars from campus and beyond had to say in recent months about democracy's challenges in a series of talks on Election Law.

In a speech lasting six minutes and one second, Khizr Khan, LL.M. ’86, whose son Capt. Humayun Khan was killed in Iraq, stepped out from behind the curtain of private pain and into the public spotlight, attracting worldwide attention.

Historically, libraries have been collections — books, multimedia materials and artwork. But increasingly they're about connections, linking digital data in new and different ways, but Harvard Law's Caselaw Access Project is a state-of-the-art example of that shift.

Addressing the incoming class at Harvard Law School, U.S. Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland ’77 recalled how, as a federal prosecutor, he helped convict the Oklahoma City bombers and the Unabomber, and also shared some not-so-famous details about his life: his addiction to his iPad, his passion for volunteerism, and his adoration of J.K. Rowling.

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.

The latest exhibit from the Harvard Law School Library, "What Not to Wear: Fashion and the Law," looks at some of the intersections of fashion and the law, from historic laws setting strict class distinctions for fashion, to modern intellectual property law’s approach to protecting those who design and create fashion.

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.

Dr. Paul Beran will join the Harvard Law School’s Islamic Legal Studies Program as executive director of SHARIAsource—the online platform designed to provide content and context on Islamic law.

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.

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 Professor I. Glenn Cohen, faculty director of the School's Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology & Bioethics spoke with the Harvard Gazette about Monday's ruling by the Supreme Court that overturned a Texas law requiring that abortion clinics maintain hospital-like standards at their facilities as well as admitting privileges at local hospitals.

On March 14, the Harvard Corporation voted to retire the Harvard Law School shield, following the recommendation of an HLS committee. The shield is modeled on the family crest of Isaac Royall, whose bequest endowed the first professorship of law at Harvard. Royall was the son of an Antiguan slaveholder.

With the passing of Justice Antonin Scalia ’60 of the U.S. Supreme Court on February 13 has come an outpouring of remembrances and testaments to his transformative presence during his 30 years on the Court. On February 24, Dean Martha Minow and a panel of seven Harvard Law School professors, each of whom had a personal or professional connection to the justice, gathered to remember his life and work.

In last year’s Academy Award-nominated film “Bridge of Spies,” Tom Hanks plays a lawyer who defends an accused Soviet spy in the U.S. The Hanks character appears to be dumbfounded that he has been asked to take on such an assignment. “I’m an insurance lawyer,” he says. The real lawyer whom Hanks portrays, James B. Donovan ’40, was that—and much more.

When he was a student at HLS, a friend made Geoff Shepard ’69 a campaign button that said “Nixon Shepard,” representing Shepard’s enthusiasm for the presidential candidacy of Richard Nixon and his hope that he would join Nixon in the White House. Shepard still has the button today and is still advocating for the president he served and defended.

A judicial temperament involves many qualities. For Merrick Garland, patience is one of them.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in History for her book “The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family,” Annette Gordon-Reed ’84 first read a biography of Thomas Jefferson as a child—and hasn’t stopped learning and writing about him. The HLS professor, who is also on the faculty at the university and the Radcliffe Institute, spoke to the Bulletin about her latest book, “Most Blessed of the Patriarchs: Thomas Jefferson and the Empire of the Imagination,” co-written with Peter S. Onuf. She discusses her own fascination with and (measured) admiration for the third U.S. president—and the significance of teaching history at the law school.

On April 1, Harvard Law School hosted a conference on 'Presidential Power in an Era of Polarized Conflict,' a daylong gathering in which experts from both sides of the aisle debated the president’s power in foreign and domestic affairs, and in issues of enforcement or non-enforcement.

As part of the Last Lecture Series presented every year by the HLS Class Marshals, Professor Annette Gordon-Reed ’84 spoke about her experiences combining legal analysis and historical research.

Merrick Garland ’77—President Obama’s pick for the Supreme Court—has been very much involved in the life of Harvard Law School since receiving his degree from HLS nearly four decades ago. Dean Martha Minow described as “an outstanding, meticulous, and thoughtful judge with a superb career of public service.”