Harvard Law School (also
known as Harvard Law or HLS) is
one of the professional graduate
schools of Harvard
University
. Located in Cambridge
, Massachusetts
, it is the oldest continually-operating law school
in the United
States
and is home to the largest academic law library in the world. HLS typically ranks
among the top law schools. The
U.S. News and World Report
law school
rankings place it as second, behind
Yale Law School.
In the 1870s, under Dean
Christopher Columbus Langdell,
HLS introduced what has become the standard first-year
curriculum for American law schools—including
classes in
contracts,
property,
torts,
criminal law, and
civil procedure. At Harvard, Langdell also
developed the
case method of
teaching law, now the dominant
pedagogical
model at U.S. law schools.
The law school is currently led by Dean
Martha Minow, who assumed the role on July 1,
2009. It was previously led by interim dean Howell Jackson, who
took over from
Elena Kagan upon her
confirmation as
Solicitor General of the
United States on March 19, 2009.
Each class in the three-year
J.D.
program has approximately 550 students. The first-year (1L) class
is broken into seven sections of approximately 80 students who take
most first-year classes together. Harvard Law has 246 faculty
members.
Admission to Harvard Law is highly selective: For the class
entering in 2008, there were approximately 7,200 applicants, of
which approximately 11.4% were admitted; 67.9% of those admitted
enrolled. For that class, the GPA for the middle 50% of the
students was between 3.74 and 3.95 (out of 4.33, as calculated by
the Law School Data Assembly Service of the Law School Admissions
Council) and an
LSAT score
between 170 and 176 (out of 180). Harvard Law's admissions process
includes the unusual feature of telephone interviews conducted with
students likely to be accepted.
Harvard Law School has produced numerous leaders in law and
politics, including the current
President of the United
States,
Barack Obama. One other
former president,
Rutherford B.
Hayes, is a graduate, as is the
current
President of
the Republic of China,
Ma
Ying-jeou.
Some 149 sitting United States federal judges are
Harvard Law School graduates, including four sitting justices of
the Supreme Court of the United
States
- Associate
Justices Anthony Kennedy,
Stephen Breyer, and Antonin Scalia, and Chief Justice John G. Roberts. Seven sitting
United States Senators graduated from
the school.
Harvard Law School graduates have accounted for 568 judicial
clerkships in the past three years, including one-quarter of all
Supreme
Court clerkships. More than 120 from the last five graduating
classes have obtained tenure-track law teaching positions.
Langdell Hall at night
Austin Hall
Langdell in the winter
Campus
Harvard
Law School's campus is located just north of Harvard Yard
, the historic center of Harvard University, and
contains several architecturally significant
buildings.
From 1849 to 1855, the
Harvard
Branch Railroad terminated within what would become the present
Law School campus, close to its southwest edge.
Austin
Hall
, the law school's oldest dedicated structure,
designed by architect H.
H. Richardson, was completed in that vicinity
in 1884. The law school's student center, Harkness Commons, was
designed by the
Bauhaus's founder,
Walter Gropius, and his firm, along with
several law school dormitories. Together they make up the
Harvard Graduate Center complex.
Langdell Hall
, the largest building on the law school campus,
contains the Harvard Law Library, the most extensive academic law
library in the world.
As of 2006, a new complex is scheduled to rise on the northwest
corner of the law school campus, to be designed by traditionalist
architect
Robert A. M. Stern. The complex is set to marry the
architectural themes present in Austin and Langdell Halls, as well
as the Gropius buildings.
History
Harvard Law School was established in 1817, making it the oldest
continuously-operating law school in the nation.
(The Marshall-Wythe School of Law at
The College
of William & Mary
opened in 1779, but was forced to close at the
outset of the American Civil War,
and did not reopen until 1920. The
University of Maryland
School of Law was chartered in 1816, but did not begin classes
until 1824, and also closed during the Civil War.)
The Royall estate
Its
origins can be traced to the estate of Isaac Royall, who sold most
of his Antiguan slaves and plantations to
move to Medford,
Massachusetts
. His Medford estate, the Isaac Royall
House
, is now a museum, and includes the only remaining
slave quarters in the northeast United States. The estate
was passed down to Royall's son,
Isaac
Royall, Jr., who fled Massachusetts as the
American Revolution broke out. Just
prior to his death in 1781, Royall, Jr. left land to Harvard, the
sale of which was intended for the "endowing of a Professor of Laws
at said college, or a Professor of Physics and Anatomy". Harvard
took the opportunity to fund its first chair of law. The Royall
chair remains today. It traditionally was held by the Dean of the
law school. The school's previous Dean,
Elena Kagan, declined the Royall chair, instead
giving herself the
Charles
Hamilton Houston Professorship.
In 1806, the Royall estate in Medford was returned to Royall, Jr.'s
heirs, who sold it and donated the proceeds for the formal
foundation of Harvard Law School. The Royall family coat-of-arms
was adopted as the school crest, which shows three stacked wheat
sheaves beneath the university motto (
Veritas, Latin
"truth").
Growth and the Langdell curriculum
By 1827, the school, which was down to one faculty member, was
struggling. An alumnus stepped in by endowing the Dane
Professorship of Law and insisting that it be given to then Supreme
Court Justice
Joseph Story. Story's
belief in the need for an elite law school based on merit and
dedicated to public service helped build the school's reputation at
the time, although the contours of these beliefs have not been
consistent throughout its history. Enrollment remained low through
the 19th century as university legal education was considered to be
of little added benefit to apprenticeships in legal practice.
In the 1870s, Christopher Columbus Langdell arrived, introducing
his new curriculum. Langdell's notion that law could be studied as
a "science" gave university legal education a reason for being
distinct from vocational preparation.
While the
law school had previously been located on Harvard Yard, the new system demanded lecture halls suited to
the case law and interrogatory Socratic
method of teaching. Henry
Hobson Richardson would later design the law school's first
independent home, the Romanesque Austin
Hall, to the north of the Yard, with these needs in
mind. This would come to form the nucleus of the current law
school campus.
As the 20th century dawned, Dean Langdell's innovations became
standard in law school curricula across the country. The school
also became the first to elevate legal education to a graduate-only
discipline. Yet new theories, such as
legal realism, blossomed at
Yale and
Columbia, while Harvard faculty members
were generally known for their conservative approach.
20th century: institutional criticism
As it rose to preeminence among law schools in the United States,
Harvard attracted significant criticism for many perceived
shortcomings.
Harvard Law was often believed to be a competitive environment. For
example, Dean Berring of
Berkeley Law
once stated that he "view[ed] Harvard Law School as a samurai ring
where you can test your swordsmanship against the swordsmanship of
the strongest intellectual warriors from around the nation." This
was possibly historically true.
When Langdell developed the original law
school curriculum, Harvard University President Charles
Eliot told him to make it "hard and long."The school
maintained a relatively uncompetitive admissions process, but
"weeded out" a large number of first year students. This gave rise
to the infamous legend of a dean at the school telling incoming
students, "Look to your left, look to your right, because one of
you won't be here by the end of the year." Novels such as
Scott Turow's
One
L and
John Jay
Osborn's
The Paper
Chase describe such an environment.
Whether the school ever was competitive is a subject of debate. A
New York Times article from 1894 described in-class moot
courts at Harvard as "co-operative."
In addition, Eleanor Kerlow's book
Poisoned Ivy: How Egos,
Ideology, and Power Politics Almost Ruined Harvard Law School
criticized the school for a 1980s political dispute between newer
and older faculty members over accusations of insensitivity to
minority and feminist issues.
Divisiveness over such issues as political correctness lent the school
the title "Beirut
on the
Charles."
In
Broken Contract: A Memoir of Harvard Law School,
Richard Kahlenberg criticized the school for driving students away
from public interest and toward work in high-paying law firms.
Kahlenberg's criticisms are supported by Granfield and Koenig's
study, which found that "students [are directed] toward service in
the most prestigious law firms, both because they learn that such
positions are their destiny and because the recruitment network
that results from collective eminence makes these jobs extremely
easy to obtain."
The school has also been criticized for extremely large first year
class sizes (at one point there were 140 students/classroom; as of
2001 there are 80), a cold and aloof administration, and an
inaccessible faculty. The latter stereotype is a central plot
element of
The Paper Chase and appears in
Legally Blonde. Inaccessibility of the
faculty was possibly a side effect of Harvard's original admissions
process, which may have annoyed faculty by giving them less than
stellar students.
This Harvard Law persisted into the latter half of the 20th
century, but bears no resemblance to the modern school. The school
eventually implemented the once-criticized but now dominant
approach pioneered by Dean
Robert
Hutchins at
Yale Law School: It
shifted the competitiveness to the admissions process. Robert
Granfield and Thomas Koenig's 1992 study of Harvard Law students
that appeared in
The Sociological Quarterly found that
students "learn to cooperate with rather than compete against
classmates," and that contrary to "less eminent" law schools,
students "learn that professional success is available for all who
attend, and that therefore, only neurotic "gunners" try to outdo
peers." According to the ABA, in 2007-2008 the school admitted only
11.8% of applicants and no students left as a result of "academic"
shortcomings.
Dean
Robert C. Clark is generally given credit for
"break[ing] the logjam" of the school's tenure battles and other
political disputes. Above all, many of the school's shortcomings
were addressed head-on by the administration of Dean Elena Kagan
after 2003.
The Kagan Deanship
Elena Kagan
Elena Kagan sought to reverse many of
the persistent stereotypes about the school when she assumed its
deanship in 2003, promising reforms. She gave students her personal
e-mail address, held office hours, successfully cut first year
class sizes in half, and was given credit for a host of
quality-of-life improvements at the law school, including an
ice-skating rink (during the winter) and a beach volleyball court
(the rest of the year) on campus, free coffee in classroom
buildings, free tampons in campus public restrooms, and the
renovation of several of the school's facilities. She also managed
to boost the school's involvement in international and public
interest law, and hired a significant number of prominent new
faculty members.
The number of students interested in public interest law positions
has expanded as Harvard has begun to offer summer funding for
public interest internships and low income loan reduction plans for
alumni who take on careers in the public interest and academia. For
example, beginning with the J.D. Class of 2011, students who pledge
to spend five years working for nonprofit organizations or the
government after graduation will receive a grant in the full amount
of their tuition during their third year, and are entitled to keep
the grant if they remain in such positions for the five-year
period. Tuition for the 2008-2009 academic year was $41,500.
In 2006, the faculty voted unanimously to approve a new first-year
curriculum, placing greater emphasis on problem-solving,
administrative law, and international law. The new curriculum is
being implemented in stages over the next several years. In late
2008, the faculty decided that the school should move to an
Honors/Pass/Low Pass (H/P/LP) grading system, much like those in
place at
Yale and
Stanford Law Schools. The system applies
to half the courses taken by students in the Class of 2010 and
fully starting with the Class of 2011.
In addition, a vast new complex under construction on the northwest
part of the law school campus is intended to expand classroom space
for additional courses and create more space for an expanding
clinical program. Several dormitories are also set to be
renovated.
Post-Kagan
In 2009, Kagan was appointed
Solicitor General of the
United States by President
Barack
Obama, and has taken a leave of absence from the faculty and
resigned the deanship. Harvard University President
Drew Gilpin Faust designated HLS professor
Howell Jackson as interim dean until a permanent replacement could
be named. On June 11, 2009, Faust announced that
Martha Minow would become the dean on July 1,
2009.
In the spring of 2009, Howell Jackson announced that he expects HLS
to lay off staff, stating that HLS would cut its budget by 10% for
the next year and make further budget cuts the following year due
to a drop in the endowment payout. In late spring and summer 2009,
the school laid off 12 staff members and consolidated its clinics
on campus. That fall, the Dean of Students announced that perks
enjoyed by students, such as some free food and coffee, as well as
funding for intellectual activities, such as colloquia, would be
reduced?
Programs
Berkman Center for Internet & Society
The
Harvard Law School was the original home of the Berkman
Center for Internet & Society
, which focuses on the study and construction of
cyberspace. The Center sponsors
conferences, courses, visiting lecturers, and residential fellows.
Members of the Center do research and write books, articles, and
weblogs with
RSS
2.0 feeds, for which the Center holds the specification.
Charles Nesson,
Lawrence Lessig,
Jonathan Zittrain,
John Palfrey,
William W. Fisher, and
Yochai Benkler hold appointments at the
Center.
The Center's present location is a small
Victorian wood-frame building which
sits next to the larger-scale buildings of the Harvard Law School
campus. It is in the process of relocating to a larger site on the
campus' perimeter after being elevated to the status of an
interfaculty center for all of Harvard University in 2008.
Its newsletter, "
The Filter", is on the Web and available by
e-mail, and it hosts a
blog community of Harvard faculty, students and
Berkman Center affiliates. The Berkman Center is funding the
Openlaw project. One of the major
initiatives of the Berkman Center is the OpenNet Initiative, which
is a joint worldwide study of the filtering of the web, along with
the Universities of Toronto and Cambridge (UK). It is also home to
Global Voices Online and
Herdict, worldwide blog-monitoring websites. The Berkman Center was
a co-sponsor of
Wikimania 2006.
Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice
Established in the fall of 2005 by Professor
Charles Ogletree, the
Charles
Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice seeks to honor
the contributions of
Charles
Hamilton Houston. The Institute carries forth Houston's legacy
by serving as a hub for scholarship, legal education, policy
analysis, and public forums on issues central to current civil
rights struggles.
Labor & Worklife Program
The
Labor and Worklife Program is a forum for research and
teaching on the world of work and its implications for society. The
program brings together scholars and policy experts from a variety
of disciplines, including scholars of labor studies and an array of
international intellectuals, to analyze critical labor issues in
the law, economy, and society. As a multidisciplinary research and
policy network, the LWP organizes projects and programs that seek
to understand critical changes in labor markets and labor law, and
to analyze the role of unions, business, and government as they
affect the world of work. It also provides unique education for
labor leaders throughout the world via the Harvard Trade Union
Program, founded in 1942, which works closely with trade unions
around the world to bring excellence in labor education to trade
union leadership. By engaging scholars, students, and members of
the labor community, the program coordinates legal, educational,
and cultural activities designed to improve the quality of work
life. It regularly holds forums, conferences, and discussion groups
on labor issues of concern to business, unions, and the
government.
Harvard Legal Aid Bureau
The
Harvard Legal Aid Bureau is the oldest
student-run legal services office in the country, founded in 1913.
The Bureau's mission is to provide an important community service
while giving student attorneys the opportunity to develop
professional skills as part of the clinical programs of Harvard Law
School.
The Harvard Legal Aid Bureau is a student-run law firm. The Bureau
serves clients in housing law (landlord-tenant relations, public
housing, subsidized housing), family law (divorce, custody,
paternity, child support), government benefits (Social Security,
unemployment benefits, Veterans' benefits, welfare), and wage and
hour cases (including unpaid or underpaid wages, benefits, and
overtime). The Bureau employs seven supervising attorneys and
elects approximately twenty student members annually. Students
practice under the supervision of admitted attorneys; however,
students are primarily casehandlers on all matters. As a result,
students gain firsthand experience appearing in court, negotiating
with opposing attorneys, and working directly with clients.
Students receive both classroom and clinical credits for their work
at the Bureau.
Unlike most clinical programs at Harvard (or other schools), the
Bureau is a two-year commitment. This gives students a chance to
have a much more sustained and in-depth academic experience. In
addition to the substantive legal experience, students gain
practical experience managing a law firm. The student board of
directors makes all decisions regarding case intake, budget
management, and office administration. Thats cool
Famous participants include Supreme Court Justice
William J. Brennan, Massachusetts Governor
Deval Patrick, activist and first lady
Michelle Obama, and professors
Erwin Chemerinsky and
Laurence Tribe.
Harvard Negotiation and Mediation Clinical Program
The
Harvard Negotiation and Mediation Clinical
Program was founded in 2006 by Professor Robert Bordone, who
saw a growing need at Harvard Law School for practical
opportunities where students could hone their negotiation and
dispute management skills. The vision for the clinic was that by
working directly with clients facing real-world problems, students
would learn to look beyond litigation as the sole means of
resolving disputes. From the start, student initiative and
engagement have been crucial in shaping the nature of this clinic.
The result is the nation’s first legal clinic focusing on dispute
systems design and conflict management.
Since 2006, the clinic has continued to grow. HNMCP expanded its
capacity by hiring additional staff to support the program and to
help develop and supervise clinical projects. Currently, in
addition to Professor Bordone, the clinic employs two full-time
teaching fellows and a part-time program coordinator. This gives
the clinic one of the best student-to-supervisor ratios at Harvard
and ensures that the clinic will continue to develop its promise as
a place where negotiation and mediation theory and practice come
together.
WilmerHale Legal Services Center
Located
in Boston’s Jamaica Plain
neighborhood, the WilmerHale Legal Services Center (formerly the Hale
and Dorr Legal Services Center) is Harvard Law School’s oldest and
largest clinical teaching facility. Students working at the
Center are placed in one of its clinics housed in five substantive
practice groups and work with clinical instructors, experienced
practitioners and mentors, who supervise student work and provide
guidance as students build and manage their own caseload. The
Center provides substantive training in each practice area and also
offers general instruction on topics such as client interviewing
and intake, case management, legal investigation and discovery,
creative legal analysis, research and drafting. In June of 2009,
Harvard Law School eliminated at least three staff positions at the
WilmerHale Legal Services Center.
Other Harvard Law School programs
Pound Hall
Classroom in Pound Hall
Two additional programs affiliated with Harvard Law School are the
Ames Foundation and the Selden Society.
Publications
Students of the Juris Doctor (JD) program are involved in preparing
and publishing the
Harvard Law
Review, one of the most renowned university
law reviews, as well as a number of other law
journals and an independent student newspaper. The
Harvard Law
Review was first published in 1887 and has been staffed and
edited by some of the school's most notable alumni. In addition to
the journal, the Harvard Law Review Association also publishes
The Bluebook: A Uniform System of
Citation, the most widely followed authority for legal
citation formats in the United States. The student newspaper, the
Harvard Law Record, has
been published continuously since the 1940s, making it one of the
oldest law school newspapers in the country, and has included the
exploits of fictional law student Fenno for decades. The
Harvard
Law School Forum on Corporate Governance and Financial
Regulation, formerly known as the
Harvard Law School
Corporate Governance Blog, is one of the most widely read law
websites in the country.
Hauser Hall
The law journals are:
Notable alumni
Barack Obama
Rutherford B. Hayes, the 19th President of the United
States, and
Barack Obama, the 44th and
current President of the United States, graduated from HLS. Obama
was the first African-American president of the
Harvard Law
Review and is now the first African-American President of the
United States. His wife
Michelle
Obama is also a graduate of Harvard Law School.
Ma Ying-jeou, the current president of the
Republic of
China
(Taiwan), received his SJD from Harvard.
Past presidential candidates who are HLS graduates include
Mitt Romney,
Michael
Dukakis and
Ralph Nader. The
plurality of US Senators with law degrees, and a significant number
of Massachusetts governors, graduated from HLS as well.
Fourteen
of the school's graduates have served on the Supreme Court
of the United States, more than any other law school, and another four
justices attended the school without graduating. Five of the
current nine members of the court attended HLS:
Chief Justice John Roberts, and
Associate
Justice Antonin Scalia,
Anthony Kennedy,
Ruth Bader Ginsburg and
Stephen Breyer. Ginsburg transferred to and
graduated from
Columbia Law
School. Past Supreme Court justices from Harvard Law School
include
David Souter,
Harry Blackmun,
Louis Brandeis,
Felix Frankfurter,
Lewis Powell (LLM), and
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., among
others.
Attorneys General
Alberto Gonzales
and
Janet Reno, among others, and noted
federal judges
Richard Posner of the
Seventh Circuit Court
of Appeals,
Judge Michael Boudin of the
First Circuit Court of
Appeals,
Laurence Silberman
of the
D.C.
Circuit Court of Appeals, and
Pierre
Leval of the
Second
Circuit Court of Appeals, among many other judicial figures,
graduated from the school. The current Commonwealth Solicitor
General of Australia Stephen Gageler
SC graduated
from Harvard with an LL.M.
Famous legal academics who graduated from Harvard Law include
Erwin Chemerinsky,
Ronald Dworkin,
Susan Estrich,
Arthur R. Miller,
William L. Prosser,
John
Sexton,
Kathleen Sullivan,
Cass Sunstein,
Michael Kinsley, and
Laurence Tribe.
In addition to their achievements in law and politics, Harvard Law
alumni have also excelled in other fields. Many have gone on to
become influential journalists, writers, media and business leaders
and even professional athletes.
Notable professors
Former notable professors
In popular culture
Books
A number of notable novels have been inspired by the student
experience at the school.
The Paper Chase is a novel
set amid a student's first ("One L") year at the school. It was
written by
John Jay Osborn,
Jr., who studied at the school. The book was later turned into
a film and a television series (see below).
Scott Turow, a novelist, also wrote a
book about his experience as a first-year law student at Harvard,
One L.
The book
Legally Blonde,
[24149] by Amanda Brown, is about a sorority girl
enrolling at Stanford Law School, much to the scrutiny of her
classmates and professors. When the book was adapted into a feature
film (which itself spawned both a sequel and a musical) the setting
was changed to Harvard Law School.
Less notable than the above novels, several memoirs have also been
written by former students at the school. Richard Kahlenberg's
account of his experiences,
Broken Contract: A Memoir of
Harvard Law School. Kahlenberg breaks from the other two
authors and describes the experience of the final two years at the
school, claiming that the environment drives students away from
their public interest aspirations and toward work in high-paying
law firms.
The book
Brush With the Law, by Robert Byrnes and Jaime
Marquart, is an account of the authors' three years in Stanford and
Harvard Law Schools. The authors indulge in alcohol, drugs,
womanizing, and gambling before passing their exams and moving on
to a successful legal career.
Film and television
Several movies and television shows take place at least in part at
the school.
Most of them have scenes filmed on location
at or around Harvard
University. They include:
Many popular movies and television shows also feature characters
introduced as Harvard Law graduates. Some of these include:
References
Further reading
External links
TV
series
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