In the fall of 1962, Caroline “Cal” Simon ’65 started at Harvard Law, one of 23 women in a class of 540. Her reflections on the experience are perfectly preserved in dozens of sharply witty letters she wrote to her family—letters she rediscovered when her father died. Together, they give an indelible sense of life at the school in the mid-1960s, and specifically, life as a woman there, a decade after women were first admitted.

President of the European Court of Justice Koen Lenaerts LL.M. ’78 keeps a photo engraving of Austin Hall in his home office in Leuven, Belgium. The image reminds him of the course he took from then HLS Professor Stephen Breyer ’64 (a 2L named John G. Roberts was also in the class), his LL.M. thesis with Duncan Kennedy, and hours spent perusing newspapers from around the world at Out of Town News in the Square. HLS is also now the alma mater of one of his six daughters.

Being an in-demand Hollywood screenwriter was not something Josh Singer '01 expected when he was at Harvard Law School.

A judicial temperament involves many qualities. For Merrick Garland, patience is one of them.

Therese Rohrbeck Meers on how she became an entrepreneur

From sex work to satire to being second-in-command.

"Advancing human rights and social justice has been a primary concern of mine for decades," said Lynn Savarese. "The three years spent at HLS focusing on fairness in myriad complex contexts helped fuel and shape this endeavor."

When he was a student at HLS, a friend made Geoff Shepard ’69 a campaign button that said “Nixon Shepard,” representing Shepard’s enthusiasm for the presidential candidacy of Richard Nixon and his hope that he would join Nixon in the White House. Shepard still has the button today and is still advocating for the president he served and defended.

Bert Rein '64 came to Supreme Court advocacy later in life and has ­focused on litigation challenging race-based protections.

In last year’s Academy Award-nominated film “Bridge of Spies,” Tom Hanks plays a lawyer who defends an accused Soviet spy in the U.S. The Hanks character appears to be dumbfounded that he has been asked to take on such an assignment. “I’m an insurance lawyer,” he says. The real lawyer whom Hanks portrays, James B. Donovan ’40, was that—and much more.

Raheemah Abdulaleem ’01 was standing on a Washington, D.C., street corner in 2009 on her way to work at the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division when a man yelled at her from his car to “go back to your country.” An African-American who grew up in Philadelphia in a family whose roots in the United States are nearly as old as the country, Abdulaleem was wearing a hijab, the traditional headscarf worn by some Muslim women.

For more than seven years, John Carlin ’99 has been at the center of the most sensitive counterterrorism cases, which have often involved tricky technological questions—first as an adviser to FBI Director Robert Mueller and then at the National Security Division.