Public Service

Mitt Romney ’75, former Massachusetts governor and Republican presidential nominee, visiting Harvard Law School (HLS) for a QandA session hosted by Dean Martha Minow, encouraged a renewed civility in politics and society, emphasizing the difference one person can make through serving others.

On March 28-29, The Harvard Food Law Society and the Food Literacy Project hosted the “Just Food? Forum on Justice in the Food System” at Harvard Law School, organized as part of Harvard’s yearlong Food Better initiative, created to discuss issues surrounding what we eat.

The value of a clear understanding of your country’s objectives and the power of personal relationships — along with the wisdom of not drinking too much lemonade — were among the insights former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright shared with an audience at Harvard Law School's on April 2.

"Powering the African Dream," a two-day series of roundtable discussions on the role of African women in in the United Nations' post-2015 Development Agenda and the Beijing +20 Review Process, was held at Harvard Law School on March 9-10.

Gabrielle Giffords, former U.S. Representative from Arizona, and her husband Mark Kelly, a Navy pilot and NASA astronaut, will be this year’s speakers for the Class Day ceremonies at Harvard Law School. Class Day will take place on Wednesday, May 27, 2015.

Last week, the nine justices of the Supreme Court peppered Tom Goldstein, veteran of 35 oral arguments before the Court and a cofounder of SCOTUSblog, with nearly 75 questions in 30 minutes – questions he was able to answer with the help of seven Harvard Law students who spent their January term working around the clock to research, write and edit the entire respondents’ brief in City of Los Angeles v. Patel.

Two recent Harvard Law School graduates, Shannon Erwin ’10 and Alana Greer ’11, have been selected as recipients of grants from the Public Service Venture Fund, a unique program that awards up to $1 million each year to help graduating Harvard Law students and recent graduates obtain their ideal jobs in public service.

The numbers paint a telling picture. In the United States of the 1950s there were between 3 million and 4 million annual cases of measles,…

Harvard Law School Senior Lecturer on Law and retired federal judge Nancy Gertner will receive the New England First Amendment Coalition's 2015 Stephen Hamblett Award, named after the late publisher of The Providence Journal and given each year to an individual who has promoted, defended or advocated for the First Amendment.

On Friday, Feb. 6, after several town hall meetings in which Harvard Law students and faculty shared their experiences and observations of discrimination and systemic injustice, as well as hopes for pedagogical and cultural shifts at the law school, the HLS community convened to discuss a somewhat more familiar law school topic: legal and policy reforms.

Dean Martha Minow welcomed former Senator Olympia Snowe and Jason Grumet ’98 to Harvard Law School on Oct. 30 to discuss their work at the Bipartisan Policy Center (BPC) and the recent report, Governing in a Polarized America: A Bipartisan Blueprint to Strengthen our Democracy.

A former NBA All Star turned humanitarian. Supreme Court justices. Student protests. Take a look at some highlights of the people who visited and events that took place this semester at Harvard Law School.

Cass Sunstein ’78, has been regarded as one of the country’s most influential and adventurous legal scholars for a generation. At 60, now Walmsley University Professor at Harvard, he publishes significant books as often as many productive academics publish scholarly articles—three of them last year.

At a time when policing, prosecutorial discretion, the death penalty, and criminal justice as a whole are under tremendous scrutiny in the United States, a new initiative at Harvard Law School seeks to analyze problems within the U.S. criminal justice system and look for solutions.

In a question-and-answer session with Dean Martha Minow at Harvard Law School on Nov. 6, former Congressman Jane Harman '69 reflected on her political career and discussed a range of issues from the fallout from the midterm elections to U.S. intelligence, foreign policy and the evolving threat of terrorism.

At the inaugural Disabled American Veterans Distinguished Speaker Series at Harvard Law School, U.S. Secretary of Veterans Affairs Robert McDonald said the troubled agency is making progress in getting its house in order, citing more — and more timely — appointments and authorizations to see private doctors for veterans who live far from VA hospitals.

From rethinking how venture capital firms meet their legal needs to focusing on broadening access to legal services for all people, Sarah Reed '91 has been a pragmatic innovator.