Public Service

In early 2014, Alec Karakatsansis, ’08, used some of the money that he and a Harvard Law School classmate had recently received from the school’s Public Service Venture Fund seed grant to buy a plane ticket to Birmingham, Alabama, and rent a car.

The Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society has released "Partisanship, Propaganda, and Disinformation: Online Media and the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election," a comprehensive analysis of online and social media coverage of the 2016 presidential campaign that documents how highly partisan right-wing sources helped shape mainstream pre-election press coverage.

When Reena Raggi graduated from Harvard Law School in 1976, the student body was only 20 percent female. But Raggi, who went on to serve 30 years on the federal bench—on the District Court for the Eastern District of New York from 1987 to 2002 and since then on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit—never thought of herself as a Harvard pioneer.

In June, the Harvard Law School’s Veterans Legal Clinic filed a class action lawsuit in Massachusetts Superior Court on behalf of Army combat veteran Jeffrey Machado and an estimated 4,000 veterans from Massachusetts who have served abroad since 9/11, but deemed ineligible to receive the state’s $1000 Welcome Home Bonus for honorably discharged servicemembers.

Latino Leadership: Embracing the Challenge

In a victory for Harvard Law School’s Crimmigration Clinic, the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts ruled that state authorities cannot detain someone for a U.S. immigration violation based solely on a Detainer.

From the Supreme Court, to the SEC, to an unidentified city under siege: legal analysis, memoir, a documentary and more works from HLS alumni.

Alex Spiro '08 has emerged in short order as the go-to lawyer for professional basketball players who get in trouble with the law in New York--just one slice of Spiro’s clientele, summarized by sports and culture website The Ringer as “the rich, the famous, and the restless.”

President Donald J. Trump has appointed Anthony Scaramucci ’89 to serve as White House communications director, upping by one the number of Harvard Law School alumni tapped to serve in the administration since Trump’s inauguration.

Born in 1910 in Nashville, Tenn., James O. Bass '34, by all accounts, has always been an impressive man. Large in stature and even more so in spirit, he was widely known from a young age for his commanding charm and quiet intelligence.

Harvard Law School has announced that the family of the late Samuel Pisar LL.M. ’55 S.J.D. ’59, has endowed a professorship and a fund to support the International Human Rights Clinic.

Drawing on his interests in constitutional law, constitutional history, and racial equality, Professor Michael Klarman’s Last Lecture explored the obstacles faced — and in many ways, overcome — by feminist lawyers and African-American civil rights lawyers in the middle of the last century.

In May 2017, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court extended the American with Disabilities Act to mentally and physically disabled prisoners seeking parole, ruling that the state must help them get support systems in place in the community—thanks to years of work by students with Harvard's Prison Legal Assistance Project.

In January, it was as if the U.S. Supreme Court were playing host to a tournament of champions for past winners of the Ames Moot Court Competition, with three attorneys who argued Midland Funding, LLC v. Johnson having been on teams that won the competition within four years of each other at Harvard Law School.

Nancy Gertner, a retired federal judge in Massachusetts who is now a senior lecturer at Harvard Law School, spoke with the Gazette about the legal issues swirling around President Donald Trump and FBI Director James Comey's testimony to the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Each May since 2011, Harvard Law School has presented "HLS Thinks Big," a TED Talks-style event that invites faculty members to present a "big idea" in front of an audience of faculty, students and staff.

Sabrineh Ardalan ’02, assistant director of the Harvard Immigration and Refugee Clinical Program and a lecturer in the fields of immigration and refugee law and advocacy and trauma, refugees, and the law has been appointed assistant clinical professor at Harvard Law School.

During this year’s Commencement ceremonies, Harvard Law School Dean Martha Minow told graduates and their families and friends that at a moment when differences sharply divide people in this country and around the world, members of the Class of 2017 “share something indelible.”

Sally Yates, the acting attorney general whom President Trump fired for refusing to enforce his tightened strictures on entering the country, said Wednesday that she acted out of a belief that defending the executive order would have meant falsely claiming it was not directed at Muslims.

A number of Harvard Law students from the Class of 2017 received special awards during Class Day. They were recognized for their outstanding leadership, citizenship, compassion and dedication to their studies and the profession.

Gloria Scott LL.M. ’17, who is from Liberia, served as chief justice of her country’s Supreme Court from 1997 to 2003. She has also been a practicing lawyer, a senator, and most recently, the chair of Liberia’s Constitutional Review Committee. But for the past year she has been eager to be a student again.