Legal History

The Harvard Corporation has approved the recommendation of the Harvard Law School Shield Committee to retire the HLS shield, which is modeled on the family crest of an 18th century slaveholder.

On Feb. 24, a panel of Harvard Law School professors, all of whom had personal or professional connections to the late Justice Antonin Scalia, gathered to remember his life and work.

During a talk Monday at Harvard Law School, Sir Hilary Beckles, a distinguished historian, scholar, and activist from Barbados, made the case for reparations, a discussion that has been re-energized in the U.S. by the Black Lives Matter movement .

U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Stephen Breyer ’64 visited Harvard Law School on Jan. 25 to discuss his new book, “The Court and the World: American Law and the New Global Realities.” Breyer, who taught at HLS from 1967 to 1994, spoke about his analysis of U.S. courts’ role in an increasingly globalized world.

Why do we compare Constitutions? Why should we? Those were the questions posed by Santiago Legarre, a professor at Universidad Católica Argentina, at a talk at Harvard Law School on Jan. 11 sponsored by HLS’s American Constitution Society.

Inspired by the interdisciplinary approach so many at Harvard Law School brought to studying law, Jorge Gonzalez S.J.D '13 is deploying that same approach in his own teaching and curricular development, translation work, and research.

On Nov. 17, Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court Elena Kagan ’86, former dean of Harvard Law School, discussed statutory interpretation in a conversation with Professor John Manning ’85 as part of the Scalia lecture series at Harvard Law School.

U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Stephen Breyer made a recent appearance at Harvard Kennedy School to discuss his new book, “The Court and the World: American Law and the New Global Realities,” with HKS Professor David Gergen, and Nancy Gertner, a former U.S. District Court judge in Massachusetts and now a senior lecturer at HLS.

Harvard Law School has announced that, with the support of Ravel Law, a legal research and analytics platform, it is digitizing its entire collection of U.S. case law, one of the largest collections of legal materials in the world, and that it will make the collection available online, for free, to anyone with an Internet connection.

The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation has awarded $425,000 over two years for the development of SHARIAsource—an online Islamic law resource founded and directed by Harvard Law School Professor Intisar Rabb.

For a deep, detailed, compellingly written, unstintingly transparent view of Harvard Law School as it was from the fall of 1817 (six students) to the spring of 1910 (765 students), look to “On the Battlefield of Merit”—the first of two volumes intended to mark the school’s bicentennial in 2017.

Sept. 29 of this year marked the 10th anniversary of the day Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. ’79 took his seat on the U.S. Supreme Court.

On September 8 at Harvard Law School's Wasserstein Hall, U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice and former HLS Dean Elena Kagan ’86 shared lessons learned from her career and offered a glimpse into the Court’s private world in a talk with HLS Dean Martha Minow.

In celebration of Constitution Day—the annual commemoration of the signing of the U.S. Constitution on Sept. 17, 1787—several Harvard Law School professors spoke about the document upon which the American legal and political systems have been built.

A study on capital punishment co-authored by Harvard Law School Professor Carol Steiker ’86 and her brother Jordan Steiker ’88 a professor at the University of Texas School of Law, was influential in Connecticut’s recent decision to abolish the death penalty in that state.

Over 300,000 rare books, 3,500 linear feet of manuscripts, and 70,000 visual resources—photographs, prints, paintings, and objects—make up Harvard Law School’s Historical and Special Collections. Here's a look inside one of the world’s most comprehensive archives of research materials for study of the history of law.

According to Professor Charles Donahue, the best-known innovation in legal academia— the case method of legal teaching—may have had an early precursor dating all the way back to the 13th century.

On September 26, Ralph Nader '58 will oversee the opening in his hometown of Winsted, Conn. of the nation's first and only museum dedicated to law: the American Museum of Tort Law.

Harvard Law School Dean Martha Minow, HLS Professor Alex Whiting and Syracuse University College of Law Assistant Professor Cora True-Frost have published a volume of essays that examine the role and the legacy of the first prosecutor for the International Criminal Court (ICC), Luis Moreno Ocampo.

The Henry Luce Foundation recently awarded $400,000 over two years for the development of SHARIAsource, a project designed to be an online portal of resources and analysis on Islamic law and directed by Harvard Law School Professor Intisar A. Rabb.

Since at least 1983, when Harvard Law student Evan Wolfson ’83 wrote a third-year paper exploring a human rights argument for same-sex marriage, Harvard Law School has participated in anticipating, shaping, critiquing, analyzing and guiding the long path toward marriage equality.