Harvard Law School

Harvard Law School
Established 1817
Type Private
Endowment US$840 million
Dean Elena Kagan
Staff 284
Students 1,800
Location Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA
Campus Urban
Website www.law.harvard.edu

Harvard Law School (HLS) is one of the professional graduate schools of Harvard University. Located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, it is considered the world's most renowned law school and is home to the largest academic law library in the world.

HLS routinely places as one of the top three schools in the U.S. News & World Report rankings, along with Yale Law School and Stanford Law School, and usually receives the highest reputational scores from judges, academics and practitioners. According to the publication, its entering class boasts the highest LSAT scores in the nation and its graduates have a higher bar passage rate and average salary upon graduation than do graduates of its closest rivals Yale, Stanford and Columbia. Harvard Law School is also noted for its size -- in its JD program, each class has approximately 550 students, compared to about 180 at Stanford, Yale and the University of Chicago, and 350 at Columbia and New York University.

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 have attended the school. Six of the current nine members of the court attended HLS: Roberts, Scalia, Kennedy, Souter, Ginsburg and Breyer. (Ginsburg transferred to and graduated from Columbia Law School.)

The current dean of Harvard Law school is Elena Kagan, who succeeded Robert Clark in 2003.

Contents

History

Harvard Law School was established in 1817, making it the oldest continuously-operating law school in the nation.

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. The Harvard Law Review was first published in 1887 and has been staffed and edited by some of the school's most famous alumni.

Berkman Center for Internet & Society

The Harvard Law School is home to 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. 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. 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). The Berkman Center is a co-sponsor of Wikimania 2006.

see also: prof Charles Nesson, Lawrence Lessig, Jonathan Zittrain, John Palfrey

Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice

Established in the fall of 2005 at Harvard Law School, the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice seeks to honor the extraordinary contributions of a great lawyer of the Twentieth Century. Charles Hamilton Houston dedicated his life to using law as a tool to reverse the unjust consequences of racial discrimination. The Institute carries forth Houston's legacy by serving as a dynamic hub for scholarship, legal education, policy analysis, and public forums on issues central to current civil rights struggles.

see also Charles Ogletree

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Labor & Worklife Program

The Labor and Worklife Program (LWP) is Harvard University’s forum for research and teaching on the world of work and its implications for society. Located at the Harvard Law School, the LWP brings together scholars and policy experts from a variety of disciplines to analyze critical labor issues in the law, economy, and society. The LWP also provides unique education for labor leaders throughout the world via the oldest executive training program at Harvard University, the Harvard Trade Union Program, founded in 1942. 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. 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.

The faculty, staff, and research associates of the Program include some of the nation’s premier scholars of labor studies and an array of internationally renowned intellectuals. The executive training program (HTUP) works closely with trade unions around the world to bring excellence in labor education to trade union leadership. The LWP regularly holds forums, conferences, and discussion groups on labor issues of concern to business, unions, and the government.

WorklifeWizard

The WorklifeWizard is an international collaboration between the European WageIndicator, the Labor and Worklife Program and the National Bureau of Economic Research. The project began this year and will become a salary checker, a database and a resource for information about American work life.

Hale and Dorr Legal Services Center

Harvard Law School has one of the country's best clinical programs. Along with the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau, the Hale and Dorr Legal Services Center is one of Harvard Law School’s oldest and largest clinical teaching facilities. The Legal Services Center is a general practice law firm that provides legal counsel to over 1,200 clients annually. It offers students an opportunity to gain practical legal experience and earn academic credit by handling real cases for real clients under the supervision of clinical instructors who are experienced practitioners and mentors. The Hale and Dorr Legal Services Center sponsors up to 70 students each semester through several clinical courses offered at Harvard Law School and, during the summer, sponsors a program for volunteer law students from across the country.

Students working at the Center are placed in one of the Hale and Dorr Legal Services Center’s clinics housed in its 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.

The Hale and Dorr Legal Services Center is located in Boston’s culturally diverse Jamaica Plain neighborhood.

Harvard Law School publications

Students at Harvard Law publish fourteen well-regarded law journals and an independent student newspaper, The Record. The Record has been published continuously since the 1950s, 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 law journals are:

Other Harvard Law School programs

  • The Ames Moot Court Competition
  • The Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice
  • Child Advocacy Program
  • East Asian Legal Studies Program
  • European Law Research Center
  • Fund for Tax and Fiscal Research
  • Human Rights Program
  • Islamic Legal Studies Program
  • John M. Olin Center for Law, Economics and Business
  • Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics
  • Program on Corporate Governance
  • Program on Emprical Legal Studies
  • Program on International Financial Systems
  • Program on Negotiation
  • Program on the Legal Profession
  • Public Interest Auction
  • Harvard Legal Aid Bureau

There are two additional programs affiliated with Harvard Law School, the Ames Foundation and the Selden Society.

Notable professors

Famous alumni

See List of notable Harvard Law School graduates.

See also: Harvard University people

Harvard Law School in popular culture

Several movies takes 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 feature characters introduced as Harvard Law graduates. Some of these movies include:

Scott Turow, a novelist, has also written a book about his experience as a first-year law student in his memoir One L.

External links


Schools of Harvard University
Faculty of Arts and Sciences: College • Graduate School of Arts and Sciences • Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences • Continuing Education
Faculty of Medicine: Medical School • School of Dental Medicine
Divinity School • Law School • Business School • Graduate School of Design
Graduate School of Education • School of Public Health • Kennedy School of Government
Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study (successor to Radcliffe College)

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