This September, Harvard Law School will commemorate 65 years since women first graduated from Harvard Law School. In this “Countless Stories” video series, Boston City Counselor Michelle Wu ’12 discusses her advocacy for inclusion, innovation, and transparency in city government.
With 29 clinics in a wide range of fields of law and policy, Harvard Law School students can develop skills in an experiential program that constantly adapts to their interests, as well as to new approaches and areas of the law. Here are four accounts from students using that opportunity to address pressing legal and social issues.
Many HLS alumni and students are engaged in legal and advocacy work related to immigration, including the situations of refugees and asylum seekers. For some of these lawyers, this interest predates their time at HLS, but has dovetailed with their coursework and hands-on learning during their time as law students.
The founder and director of Harvard Immigration and Refugee Clinic Deborah Anker LL.M. ’84 received the Federal Bar Association’s NGO Lawyer of the Year Joint Award on May 18. She was honored alongside Karen Musalo, director of the Center for Gender and Refugee Studies at Hastings College of the Law.
As part of a cooperative agreement between the two schools, Harvard Law Professors Glenn Cohen, Holger Spamann, and Lucie White traveled to France in June to teach at the eighth annual Intensive Doctoral Week (IDW) at the law school of the Institut d’Études Politiques de Paris, more commonly known as “Sciences Po.”
For the past six months, Harvard Law School students and alumni have been working with legal professionals to create strategies promoting diversity in the legal workplace. These were unveiled on June 22 at Diversity Lab’s Diversity in Law Hackathon, co-sponsored by Harvard Law School Executive Education and Bloomberg Law.
As attorney general of the Navajo Nation, Ethel Branch ’08 aims to strengthen tribal law and native voices.
After Hurricane Maria roared over Puerto Rico in September 2017, crippling the island where Natalie Trigo Reyes ’19 grew up and where much of her family still lives, she felt “completely overwhelmed.” Within days, however, she put together an event that raised about $40,000 for relief efforts, collected enough emergency goods to fill three large trucks, and joined Harvard Law Assistant Professor Andrew Manuel Crespo ’08 and Lee Branson Mestre of the Office of Clinical and Pro Bono Programs to plan the school’s response to the disaster.
Thanks to Peter Trooboff ’67, a plaque now marks the building in Lviv, Ukraine, where his mentor international law Professor Louis Sohn LL.M. ’40 S.J.D. ’58 spent part of his childhood in the 1930s.
‘Crimmigration’—the intersection of criminal and immigration law—is the newest policy area for the Harvard Immigration and Refugee Clinical Program (HIRC). In addition to its broader advocacy clinic, HIRC offers Phil Torrey’s crimmigration clinic in the spring: an opportunity for students to gain direct experience working on and contributing to case law in this young field.
