Harvard Law School (HLS) is the law school of Harvard University, a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1817, it is the oldest law school in continuous operation in the United States.
Each class in the three-year JD program has approximately 560 students, which is among the largest law schools in the United States. 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 has the world's largest academic law library. The school has an estimated 115 full-time faculty members. According to Harvard Law's 2020 ABA-required disclosures, 99% of 2019 graduates passed the bar exam.Rubino, Kathryn. "Bar Passage Rates For First-time Test Takers Soars!". February 19, 2020. Retrieved September 4, 2020. 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.. 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.
History Founding Harvard Law School's founding is traced to the establishment of a "law department" at Harvard in 1819. 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 during 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 it also closed during the Civil War.
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 merchant and slave-trader Isaac Royall Jr., in 1817. Royall had fled to Nova Scotia as a Loyalist during the American Revolution. When Royall died in exile in 1781, he left roughly 1,000 acres of land in Massachusetts to Harvard, "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." 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. The Royalls were so involved in the slave trade, that "the labor of slaves underwrote the teaching of law in Cambridge." 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'). 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. In March 2016, following requests by students, the school decided to remove the emblem because of its association with slavery. In November 2019, Harvard announced that a working group had been tasked to develop a new emblem. In August 2021, the new Harvard Law School emblem was introduced.
In 2019, the government of Antigua and Barbuda requested reparations from Harvard Law School on the grounds that it benefitted from Royall's enslavement of people in the country.
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".. 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. 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. 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. In 1869, HLS also eliminated examination requirements.
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. 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.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.
20th century
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." When Langdell developed the original law school curriculum, Harvard President Charles Eliot told him to make it "hard and long". 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." 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.
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 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, 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 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."
21st century
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, 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.
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. In June 2017, John F. Manning was named as the new dean, effective as of July 1, 2017.
In September 2017, the school unveiled a plaque acknowledging the indirect role played by slavery in its history:
In 2025, an original copy of the Magna Carta was found, kept in Harvard's library for nearly 80 years.
Coat of arms
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.Harvard Law School to ditch controversial shield Steve Annear. Boston Globe. March 14, 2016. Retrieved April 26, 2016The Harvard Law shield tied to slavery is already disappearing, after corporation vote . Susan Svrluga. Washington Post. March 15, 2016. Retrieved April 26, 2016
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,Harvard Law to Abandon Crest Linked to Slavery Anemona Hartocollis. New York Times. March 4, 2016. Retrieved April 26, 2016 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.The Harvard Law shield tied to slavery is already disappearing, after corporation vote . Susan Svrluga. Washington Post. March 14, 2016. Retrieved April 26, 2016Harvard Corporation agrees to retire HLS shield Harvard Law Today. March 14, 2016. Retrieved April 26, 2016