Each class in the three-year JD program has approximately 560 students, which is among the largest of the top 150 ranked law schools in the United States.[6] The first-year class is broken into seven sections of approximately 80 students, who take most first-year classes together. Aside from the JD program, Harvard also awards both LLM and SJD degrees.
HLS is home to the world's largest academic law library.[7][8] The school has an estimated 115 full-time faculty members.[3] According to Harvard Law's 2020 ABA-required disclosures, 99% of 2019 graduates passed the bar exam.[9][10][11] The school's graduates accounted for more than one-quarter of all Supreme Court clerks between 2000 and 2010, more than any other law school in the United States.[12]
History
Founding
Harvard Law School's founding is traced to the establishment of a 'law department' at Harvard in 1819.[13] Dating the founding to the year of the creation of the law department makes Harvard Law School the oldest continuously operating law school in the United States. William & Mary Law School opened first in 1779, but it closed due to the American Civil War, reopening in 1920.[14] The University of Maryland School of Law was chartered in 1816 but did not begin classes until 1824, and it also closed during the Civil War.[15]
The founding of the law department came two years after the establishment of Harvard's first endowed professorship in law, funded by a bequest from the estate of wealthy slave-owner Isaac Royall Jr., in 1817.[13] Royall left roughly 1,000 acres of land in Massachusetts to Harvard when he died in exile in Nova Scotia, where he fled to as a Loyalist during the American Revolution, in 1781, "to be appropriated towards the endowing a Professor of Laws ... or a Professor of Physick and Anatomy, whichever the said overseers and Corporation [of the college] shall judge to be best."[13] The value of the land, when fully liquidated in 1809, was $2,938; the Harvard Corporation allocated $400 from the income generated by those funds to create the Royall Professorship of Law in 1815.[13] The Royalls were so involved in the slave trade, that "the labor of slaves underwrote the teaching of law in Cambridge."[16] The dean of the law school traditionally held the Royall chair; deans Elena Kagan and Martha Minow declined the Royall chair due to its origins in the proceeds of slavery.
The Royall family's coat of arms, which shows three stacked wheat sheaves on a blue background, was adopted as part of the law school's arms in 1936, topped with the university's motto (Veritas, Latin for 'truth').[17] Until the school began investigating its connections with slavery in the 2010s, most alumni and faculty at the time were unaware of the origins of the arms.[18] In March 2016, following requests by students, the school decided to remove the emblem because of its association with slavery.[19] In November 2019, Harvard announced that a working group had been tasked to develop a new emblem.[20] In August 2021, the new Harvard Law School emblem was introduced.[21]
Royall's Medford estate, the Isaac Royall House, is now a museum which features the only remaining slave quarters in the northeast United States. In 2019, the government of Antigua and Barbuda requested reparations from Harvard Law School on the ground that it benefitted from Royall's enslavement of people in the country.[22]
Growth
By 1827, the school, with one faculty member, was struggling. Nathan Dane, a prominent alumnus of the college, then endowed the Dane Professorship of Law, insisting that it be given to then Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story. For a while, the school was called "Dane Law School."[23] In 1829, John H. Ashmun, son of Eli Porter Ashmun and brother of George Ashmun, accepted a professorship and closed his Northampton Law School, with many of his students following him to Harvard.[24] 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. After first trying lowered admissions standards, in 1848 HLS eliminated admissions requirements entirely.[25] In 1869, HLS also eliminated examination requirements.[25]
In the 1870s, under DeanChristopher 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. Langdell's notion that law could be studied as a "science" gave university legal education a reason for being distinct from vocational preparation. Critics at first defended the old lecture method because it was faster and cheaper and made fewer demands on faculty and students. Advocates said the case method had a sounder theoretical basis in scientific research and the inductive method. Langdell's graduates became leading professors at other law schools where they introduced the case method. The method was facilitated by casebooks. From its founding in 1900, the Association of American Law Schools promoted the case method in law schools that sought accreditation.[26][27]
During the 20th century, Harvard Law School was known for its competitiveness. For example, Bob Berring called it "a samurai ring where you can test your swordsmanship against the swordsmanship of the strongest intellectual warriors from around the nation."[28] When Langdell developed the original law school curriculum, Harvard President Charles Eliot told him to make it "hard and long."[29][30] An urban legend holds that incoming students are told to "Look to your left, look to your right, because one of you won't be here by the end of the year."[31]Scott Turow's memoir One L and John Jay Osborn's novel The Paper Chase describe such an environment. Trailing many of its peers, Harvard Law did not admit women as students until 1950, for the class of 1953.[32]
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."[33]
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."[34] The school has also been criticized for its large first year class sizes (at one point there were 140 students per classroom; in 2001 there were 80), a cold and aloof administration,[35] and an inaccessible faculty. The latter stereotype is a central plot element of The Paper Chase and appears in Legally Blonde.
In response to the above criticisms, HLS eventually implemented the once-criticized[30] but now dominant approach pioneered by Dean Robert Hutchins at Yale Law School, of shifting the competitiveness to the admissions process while making law school itself a more cooperative experience. 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."[34]
Under Kagan, the second half of the 2000s saw significant academic changes since the implementation of the Langdell curriculum. 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 was implemented in stages over the next several years,[36][37] with the last new course, a first year practice-oriented problem solving workshop, being instituted in January 2010. In late 2008, the faculty decided that the school should move to an Honors/Pass/Low Pass/Fail (H/P/LP/F) grading system, much like those in place at Yale and at Stanford Law School. The system applied to half the courses taken by students in the Class of 2010 and fully started with the Class of 2011.[38]
In 2009, Kagan was appointed solicitor general of the United States by President Barack Obama and resigned the deanship. On June 11, 2009, Harvard University president, Drew Gilpin Faust named Martha Minow as the new dean. She assumed the position on July 1, 2009. On January 3, 2017, Minow announced that she would conclude her tenure as dean at the end of the academic year.[39] In June 2017, John F. Manning was named as the new dean, effective as of July 1, 2017.[40]
In September 2017, the school unveiled a plaque acknowledging the indirect role played by slavery in its history:
In honor of the enslaved whose labor created wealth that made possible the founding of Harvard Law SchoolMay we pursue the highest ideals of law and justice in their memory[41]
Coat of arms
The coat of arms of Harvard Law School which was retired in 2016
The governing body of the university voted to retire the law school's coat of arms. The school's shield incorporated the three garbs of wheat from the armorial bearings of Isaac Royall Jr., a university benefactor who had endowed the first professorship in the law school. The shield had become a source of contention among a group of law school students, who objected to the Royall family's history of slave ownership.[42][43]
The president of the university and dean of the law school, acting upon the recommendation of a committee formed to study the issue, ultimately agreed with its majority decision,[44] that the shield was inconsistent with the values of both the university and the law school. Their recommendation was ultimately adopted by the Harvard Corporation and on March 15, 2016, the shield was ordered retired.[45][46][47]
On August 23, 2021, it was announced that a new emblem was approved by the Harvard Corporation. The new design features Harvard's traditional motto, Veritas (Latin for 'truth'), resting above the Latin phrase Lex et Iustitia, meaning 'law and justice'. According to the HLS Shield Working Group's final report, the expanding or diverging lines, some with no obvious beginning or end, are meant to convey a sense of broad scope or great distance — the limitlessness of the school's work and mission. The radial lines also allude to the latitudinal and longitudinal lines that define the arc of the earth, conveying the global reach of the Law School's community and impact. The multifaceted, radiating form — a form inspired by architectural details found in both Austin Hall and Hauser Hall — seeks to convey dynamism, complexity, inclusiveness, connectivity, and strength.[48]
Rankings
HLS was ranked as the fifth best law school in the United States by U.S. News & World Report in its 2023 rankings.[49][50] HLS was ranked first in the world by QS World University Rankings in 2023.[51] It is ranked first in the world by the 2019 Academic Ranking of World Universities.[52]
HLS has graduated the largest number of U.S. Supreme Court justices and U.S. attorneys general. HLS is the best represented law school in the current U.S. Congress and among the law faculty at U.S. law schools.
In November 2022, the law school made a joint decision along with Yale Law School to withdraw from the U.S. News & World Report Best Law Schools rankings, citing the system's "flawed methodology."[53]
Student life
Student organizations
Harvard Law School has more than 90 student organizations that are active on campus.[54] These organizations include the student-edited journals, Harvard Law Record, and the HLS Drama Society, which organizes the annual Harvard Law School Parody, the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau as well as other political, social, service, and athletic groups.
HLS Student Government is the primary governing, advocacy, and representative body for Law School students. In addition, students are represented at the university level by the Harvard Graduate Council.
Students of the Juris Doctor (JD) program are involved in preparing and publishing the Harvard Law Review, one of the most highly cited university law reviews, as well as several 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.[55]
In addition to the journal, the Harvard Law Review Association, in conjunction with the Columbia Law Review, University of Pennsylvania Law Review, and Yale Law Journal 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.[56][57] 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. Harvard Human Rights Reflections, which is hosted by the Human Rights Program, is a widely read discussion platform for critical engagement with the human rights project. It features legal arguments, advocacy pieces, applied research, practitioner's notes and other forms of reflections related to human rights law, theory, and practice.
The Harvard Law Bulletin is the magazine of record for Harvard Law School.[58] The Harvard Law Bulletin was first published in April 1948. The magazine is currently published twice a year, but in previous years has been published four or six times a year. The magazine was first published online in fall 1997.[59]
The cost of tuition for the 2022–2023 school year (9 month term) is $72,430. A Mandatory HUHS Student Health Fee is $1,304, bringing the total direct costs for the 2022–2023 school year to $73,734.[91]
The total cost of attendance (indicating the cost of tuition, fees, and living expenses) at Harvard Law for the 2021–2022 academic year is $104,200.[92]
Employment
According to the school's employment summary for 2020 graduates, 86.8% were employed in bar passage required jobs and another 5.3% were employed in J.D. advantage jobs.[93]
Lobsang Sangay is the first elected sikyong of the Tibetan Government in Exile. In 2004, he earned a S.J.D. degree from Harvard Law School and was a recipient of the 2004 Yong K. Kim' 95 Prize of excellence for his dissertation "Democracy in Distress: Is Exile Polity a Remedy? A Case Study of Tibet's Government-in-exile".
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 wrote a memoir of his experience as a first-year law student at Harvard, One L.
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 School graduates. The central plot point of the TV series Suits is that one of the main characters did not attend Harvard but fakes his graduate status in order to practice law.
A Juris Doctor, Doctor of Jurisprudence, or Doctor of Law (JD) is a graduate-entry professional degree that primarily prepares individuals to practice law. In the United States, it is the only qualifying law degree. Other jurisdictions, such as Australia, Canada, and Hong Kong, offer both the postgraduate JD degree as well as the undergraduate LL.B., BCL, or other qualifying law degree depending on the requirements of the jurisdiction where the person will practice law.
A law school in the United States is an educational institution where students obtain a professional education in law after first obtaining an undergraduate degree.
Columbia Law School (CLS) is the law school of Columbia University, a private Ivy League university in New York City.
Cornell Law School is the law school of Cornell University, a private, Ivy League university in Ithaca, New York.
The University of Chicago Law School is the law school of the University of Chicago, a private research university in Chicago, Illinois. It employs more than 180 full-time and part-time faculty and hosts more than 600 students in its Juris Doctor program, while also offering the Master of Laws, Master of Studies in Law and Doctor of Juridical Science degrees in law.
Yale Law School (YLS) is the law school of Yale University, a private research university in New Haven, Connecticut. It was established in 1824. The 2020–21 acceptance rate was 4%, the lowest of any law school in the United States. Its yield rate of 87% is also consistently the highest of any law school in the United States.
The University of Michigan Law School is the law school of the University of Michigan, a public research university in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Founded in 1859, the school offers Master of Laws (LLM), Master of Comparative Law (MCL), Juris Doctor (JD), and Doctor of the Science of Law (SJD) degree programs.
The New York University School of Law is the law school of New York University, a private research university in New York City.
The University of Virginia School of Law is the law school of the University of Virginia, a public research university in Charlottesville, Virginia.
A Doctor of Juridical Science, or a Doctor of the Science of Law, is a research doctorate degree in law that is equivalent to the Doctor of Philosophy degree.
Legal education in the United States generally refers to a graduate degree, the completion of which makes a graduate eligible to sit for an examination for a license to practice as a Lawyer. Around 60 percent of those who complete a law degree typically practice law, with the remainder primarily working in business or government or policy roles, where their degrees also confer advantages.
Vanderbilt University Law School is the law school of Vanderbilt University. Established in 1874, it is one of the oldest law schools in the southern United States. Vanderbilt Law enrolls approximately 640 students, with each entering Juris Doctor class consisting of approximately 175 students.
University of Illinois Chicago School of Law is the law school of the University of Illinois Chicago, a public research university in Chicago, Illinois. Founded in 1899, it became affiliated with the university in 2019. The school offers programs for both part-time and full-time students, with both day and night classes available, and offers January enrollment.
The USC Gould School of Law located in Los Angeles, California, is the law school of the University of Southern California. The oldest law school in the Southwestern United States, USC Law traces its beginnings to 1896 and became affiliated with USC in 1900. It was named in honor of Judge James Gould in the mid-1960s.
Paul Finkelman is an American legal historian. He is the author or editor of more than 50 books on American legal and constitutional history, slavery, general American history and baseball. In addition, he has authored more than 200 scholarly articles on these and many other subjects. From 2017 - 2022, Finkelman served as the President and Chancellor of Gratz College, Melrose Park, Pennsylvania.
Colonel Isaac Royall Jr. was an Antiguan-born merchant, politician, slave trader and military officer who spent the majority of his life in the Province of Massachusetts Bay.
John Francis Manning is an American legal scholar who serves as the provost of Harvard University. He is the Dane Professor of Law at Harvard Law School (HLS), where he is a scholar of administrative and constitutional law. From 2017 to 2024, he was the 13th Dean of Harvard Law School.
David B. Wilkins is an American legal scholar who is the Lester Kissel Professor of Law and faculty director of the Center on the Legal Profession at Harvard Law School. He is a senior research fellow of the American Bar Foundation, the Harvard Law School's vice dean for global initiatives on the legal profession, and a faculty associate of the Harvard University Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics.
Tomiko Brown-Nagin is an American legal scholar, historian, and academic. She is dean of Harvard Radcliffe Institute. She is also the Daniel P.S. Paul Professor of Constitutional Law at Harvard Law School and a Harvard University professor of history.
Belinda Sutton, also known as Belinda Royall, was a woman born in what is now Ghana who was enslaved by the Royall family at the Royall House and Slave Quarters in Medford, Massachusetts, USA. Additional details of Sutton's family life are under ongoing research. Baptism records for a son Joseph, and a daughter Prine, appear in church records. Belinda was abandoned by Isaac Royall Jr. when he fled to Nova Scotia at the beginning of the American Revolution. In Royall's will, a number of enslaved people are listed, but Belinda was unique in his wishes:
"In his will he gave his slave Belinda the option of freedom, and he further 'provided that she get security that she shall not be a charge in the town of Medford.' If she did not elect freedom, he bequeathed her to his daughter Mary Erving. Other slaves were bequeathed and some were sold, but Belinda was emancipated."
↑ "Best Law Schools". U.S. News & World Report. Archived from the original on July 13, 2013. Retrieved January 7, 2016.
↑ "About". Harvard Law School. Archived from the original on January 10, 2016. Retrieved January 7, 2016.
↑ "The Harvard Law School Library". Library Tours. International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions. Archived from the original on February 4, 2017. Retrieved January 7, 2016.
↑ "Brian Leiter Law School Supreme Court Clerkship Placement, 2000-2010". leiterrankings.com. Archived from the original on December 17, 2017. Retrieved December 17, 2017.. However, because of its greater size, approximately 2.5 times that of Yale, Harvard had a greater total number of Supreme Court while Yale has a significantly higher per-capita placement of clerks on the Court. Id.
↑ Sven Beckert, Katherine Stevens and the students of the Harvard and Slavery Research Seminar (2011). "Harvard and Slavery: Seeking a Forgotten History"(PDF). Harvard University. p.11. Archived(PDF) from the original on July 28, 2018. Retrieved December 12, 2018.
↑ "Issues Archive". Harvard Law Today. Harvard University. Archived from the original on October 24, 2014. Retrieved March 10, 2015.
↑ "LAW SCHOOL HAS FINE PORTRAIT COLLECTION | News | The Harvard Crimson". Thecrimson.com. January 23, 1930. Archived from the original on March 3, 2016. Retrieved March 10, 2015.. The school is called Dane Law School in an 1854 letter written by Rev. C.C. Jones to his son, Robert Manson Myers, ed., The Children of Pride: A True Story of Georgia and the Civil War (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1972), p. 42.
↑ Kimball, Bruce A. (2006). "The Proliferation of Case Method Teaching in American Law Schools: Mr. Langdell's Emblematic "Abomination", 1890–1915". History of Education Quarterly. 46 (2): 192–247. doi:10.1111/j.1748-5959.2006.tb00066.x. JSTOR20462057. S2CID143692702.
↑ Bruce A. Kimball, '"Warn Students That I Entertain Heretical Opinions, Which They Are Not To Take as Law': The Inception of Case Method Teaching in the Classrooms of the Early C.C. Langdell, 1870–1883," Law and History Review 17 (Spring 1999): 57–140.
1 2 Granfield, Robert; Koenig, Thomas (2005), "Learning Collective Eminence: Harvard Law School and the Social Production of Elite Lawyers", Sociological Quarterly, 33 (4): 503–20, doi:10.1111/j.1533-8525.1992.tb00140.x
↑ Shammas, Michael (September 9, 2015). "Donate to the Harvard Law Record". Harvard Law Record. The Harvard Law Record. Archived from the original on February 5, 2018. Retrieved February 4, 2018.
↑ "Publications". Harvard Law School. Archived from the original on March 2, 2021. Retrieved March 4, 2021.
↑ "PBLCLS". Harvard Law School Program on Biblical Law and Christian Legal Studies. Archived from the original on March 2, 2021. Retrieved March 19, 2021.
↑ "PIFS". www.pifsinternational.org. Archived from the original on March 24, 2021. Retrieved March 19, 2021.
↑ "HLS PILAC". HLS PILAC. Archived from the original on March 24, 2021. Retrieved March 19, 2021.
↑ "Home". Program on Law and Society in the Muslim World. Archived from the original on March 2, 2021. Retrieved March 19, 2021.
↑ "Negotiation and Leadership". PON - Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School. Archived from the original on March 17, 2021. Retrieved March 19, 2021.
Centennial History of the Harvard Law School, 1817–1917, Harvard Law School Association, 1918, OL7224560M
Chase, Anthony. "The Birth of the Modern Law School," American Journal of Legal History (1979) 23#4 pp.329–48 in JSTOR
Coquillette, Daniel R. and Bruce A. Kimball. On the Battlefield of Merit: Harvard Law School, the First Century (Harvard University Press, 2015) 666 pp.
Granfield, Robert (1992). Making Elite Lawyers: Visions of Law at Harvard and Beyond. New York: Routledge.
Kimball, Bruce A. "The Proliferation of Case Method Teaching in American Law Schools: Mr. Langdell's Emblematic 'Abomination,' 1890–1915," History of Education Quarterly (2006) 46#2 pp.192–240 in JSTOR
Kimball, Bruce A. '"Warn Students That I Entertain Heretical Opinions, Which They Are Not To Take as Law': The Inception of Case Method Teaching in the Classrooms of the Early C.C. Langdell, 1870–1883," Law and History Review 17 (Spring 1999): 57–140.
LaPiana, William P. Logic and Experience: The Origin of Modern American Legal Education (1994)
Warren, Charles (1908), History of the Harvard Law School and of Early Legal Conditions in America, New York: Lewis, OL7062252M + v.2, v.3
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
