Harvard Law School (also known as Harvard Law or HLS) is one of the professional graduate schools of Harvard University. Located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, it is the oldest continually-operating law school in the United States and is home to the largest academic law library in the world. It is ranked third on the U.S. News & World Report Law School Ranking.
The current Dean of Harvard Law School is Martha Minow, who assumed the role on July 1, 2009. Harvard Law has 246 faculty members. Many are preeminent legal scholars; Harvard Law School faculty were responsible for more papers downloaded on the Social Science Research Network than any other law school, a fact only partially explained by the school's size.
Harvard Law School has produced a large number of luminaries in law and politics including 2012 US Presidential candidates Barack Obama and Mitt Romney. World leaders counted among its graduates include the current President of the Republic of China (Taiwan), Ma Ying-jeou; former Chief Justice of the Republic of the Philippines, Renato Corona; Chief Justice of Singapore-designate Sundaresh Menon; former President of the World Bank Group, Robert Zoellick; current United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navanethem Pillay; and the former President of Ireland, Mary Robinson. Some 149 sitting United States federal judges are Harvard Law School graduates; six of the nine sitting justices of the Supreme Court of the United States attended the law school (Chief Justice John G. Roberts and Associate Justices Anthony Kennedy, Stephen Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Antonin Scalia and Elena Kagan). Seven sitting U.S. Senators graduated from the school.
Harvard Law School has also educated a significant number of leaders and innovators in the business world. Business leaders counted among its graduates include the current Chairman and CEO of Goldman Sachs, Lloyd Blankfein; current Chairman of the Board and majority owner of National Amusements, billionaire Sumner Redstone; current President and CEO of TIAA-CREF, Roger W. Ferguson, Jr.; current CEO and Chairman of Toys "R" Us, Gerald L. Storch; and former CEO of Delta Air Lines, Gerald Grinstein, among many others.
Each class in the three-year J.D. program has approximately 550 students. The first-year (1L) class is broken into seven sections of approximately 80 students who take most first-year classes together. Harvard Law School graduates have accounted for 568 judicial clerkships in the past three years, including one-quarter of all Supreme Court clerkships. More than 120 from the last five graduating classes have obtained tenure-track law teaching positions.
Read more about Harvard Law School: Campus, History, Publications, Notable Alumni, Notable Professors
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“You don’t need a Harvard MBA to know that the bedroom and the boardroom are just two sides of the same ballgame.”
—Stephen Fry (b. 1957)
“I had often stood on the banks of the Concord, watching the lapse of the current, an emblem of all progress, following the same law with the system, with time, and all that is made ... and at last I resolved to launch myself on its bosom and float whither it would bear me.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“School divides life into two segments, which are increasingly of comparable length. As much as anything else, schooling implies custodial care for persons who are declared undesirable elsewhere by the simple fact that a school has been built to serve them.”
—Ivan Illich (b. 1926)