Legal History

The Harvard Law School mock trial team of Kaitlyn Beck ’19, Tiffany Li ’21, Rahul Garabadu ’19, and Jillian Tancil ’19 competed at the National Student Trial Advocacy Competition April 11-14 in Philadelphia, PA.

This Law Day, we reflect on the theme of "Free Speech, Free Press, Free Society" with two writers' takes on Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.'s life and impact.

Hours after the Mueller report was released, the Harvard Gazette spoke with former prosecutor Alex Whiting, a professor of practice at Harvard Law School who teaches issues and procedures related to domestic and international criminal prosecutions.

Nearly a decade after Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning shared classified materials with WikiLeaks, the site’s founder, Julian Assange, was arrested in London for his role in the disclosures. The Harvard Gazette recently spoke with three faculty members, including Yochai Benkler, the Harvard Law professor who has publicly defended the disclosure as whistleblowing.

Harvard Law School recently hosted Judge Richard Gergel, U.S. District Judge of the U. S. District Court for the District of South Carolina, for a talk on his book, "Unexampled Courage,” and a discussion with HLS professors Randall Kennedy, Kenneth Mack and Mark Tushnet.

The Harvard Legal Aid Bureau has received a major win in a case that may change the standard for determining attorney's fees in wage lawsuits in Massachusetts.

The Harvard Law School Library recently hosted Claire Finkelstein, professor of law and philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania, for a discussion on "Sovereignty and the New Executive Authority," a volume of essays exploring the growing struggle to maintain the legal and ethical boundaries surrounding executive authority in the post- 9/11 United States.

During Winter Term, 12 Harvard Law School students traveled to 12 countries as Cravath International Fellows to pursue clinical placements or independent research with an international, transnational, or comparative law focus. Four of them share their experiences.

Linda Greenhouse, the Joseph Goldstein Lecturer in Law and Knight Distinguished Journalist-in-Residence at Yale Law School, delivered the Kissel Lecture in Ethics at Harvard Law School on Feb. 7. In her lecture, Greenhouse discussed the role of the Supreme Court in threatening civil society and looked critically at recent Supreme Court decisions.

Europe’s crisis—the challenges to liberal democracy across the continent, the rise of right-wing nationalist parties, the backlash against the European Union—isn’t a rebellion of economic have-nots, according to former HLS professor Joseph Weiler, who delivered the Herbert W. Vaughan Memorial Lecture, “The European Culture War 2003-2019,” on Feb. 6.

The Harvard Law Review has elected Lauren Beck ’20 as its 133rd president. Beck succeeds Michael Thomas ’19.

Bryan Stevenson ’85 discusses the legacy of slavery and the vision behind creating the National Memorial for Peace and Justice and The Legacy Museum in Montgomery Alabama.

There are more than 2 million people imprisoned in the U.S. today. One hundred years from now, historians are likely to be fascinated by this carceral state: How did we get here? Are there better options for society? Some of the answers—or, at least, possible alternatives—may lie in an examination of medieval England. As a Harvard undergrad, Assistant Professor Elizabeth Papp Kamali ’07 fell in love with medieval legal history. After graduating from HLS, she got her Ph.D. in history at the University of Michigan, then joined the HLS faculty in 2015.

Assistant Professor Anna Lvovsky '13, who joined the HLS faculty in 2017, always planned to teach. A legal historian - she holds a Ph.D. from Harvard - with a focus on the administration of criminal justice, she teaches a seminar on the history of policing in the U.S. as well as courses on evidence and criminal law that invite students to focus on the systemic effects of seemingly neutral legal rules.

In the “Countless Stories” video series, Paul Clement ’92, a former United States Solicitor General and current partner at the law firm of Kirkland & Ellis, discusses his advocacy before the Supreme Court.

It was Thursday night and the Ames Courtroom was decked out for a Hollywood-style awards ceremony--1Ls and their dates arrived in tuxes and ball gowns while a jazz combo played, and anticipation was in the air. The winter’s first snow was falling outside, but in Austin Hall, the Tortys had come to town.

On a March evening, Michael Thomas Jr. gave a tour of Gannett House to his dad and two brothers, who were visiting to see where Barack Obama first made headlines as the first black leader of the Harvard Law Review. But they were also there to celebrate Thomas, who had recently been elected the journal’s third African-American president.

“Tough Cases,” a new book in which 13 trial judges from criminal, civil, probate, and family courts write candid and poignant firsthand accounts of the trials they can’t forget, was the subject of a lively discussion at a panel sponsored by the Harvard Law School Library, which drew a packed house at Wasserstein Hall in October.

Dieter Grimm LL.M. ’65, a noted scholar, academic and public intellectual, and former justice of the Federal Constitutional Court of Germany, returned to Harvard Law School on September 18 to speak on “Courts under Political Pressure.”

With the Supreme Court divided ideologically along partisan lines for the first time in history, the Solicitor General—no matter the administration—has become more political. How did this post, long regarded as the keel keeping the government balanced, come to contribute to forceful tacks one way or the other, to the Court’s seeming indifference?

The Harvard Law School Library hosted a series of book talks by HLS authors, with topics including Authoritarianism in America, the Supreme Court of India, and Legal Reasoning and Political Conflict. As part of this ongoing series, faculty authors from various disciplines shared their research and discussed their recently published books with a panel of colleagues and the Harvard Law community.