Harvard Law School

Overview

Harvard Law School, the law school of Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is usually introduced as the birthplace of modern American legal education (Harvard Law School). The part that rarely leads the story is the one the school itself chose to put at the center of its 200th anniversary: the institution was built with money made by enslaved labor, and in 2017 it unveiled a permanent memorial on campus saying so (Harvard Law School; Smithsonian Magazine).

A founding funded by slavery

Harvard Law School was founded in 1817 with a bequest from Isaac Royall Jr., whose wealth was derived from the labor of enslaved people on a sugar plantation he owned on the island of Antigua and on farms he owned in Massachusetts (Harvard Law School). When the school opened, it occupied College House Number 2, next to the courthouse — but it was part of Harvard College, and it had exactly 15 students and one teacher (Harvard Law School). At a time when most lawyers were still taught through apprenticeship, it was the first professional law school within the context of a university to teach people to be lawyers — what the school’s own historian has called its “first big idea” (Harvard Law School).

The depth of the Royall fortune’s roots in slavery is documented in the school’s own bicentennial account: local Antigua newspapers repeatedly carried advertisements from Royall buying and selling horses, cattle, and people, one of them offering “A Likely Negro Wench to dispose of” along with four of her children (Smithsonian Magazine).

Langdell and the case method

The school’s second founding idea arrived half a century later. Dean Christopher Columbus Langdell, who led the school from 1870 to 1895, introduced the case method of teaching law: instead of lectures and treatises, students would derive legal principles from studying appellate court opinions themselves (Harvard Law School). The revolution it started is a matter of record in the school’s own historical scholarship — Langdell’s method was developed and expanded at Harvard over the next twenty years, then widely adopted elsewhere, until the case method “may be said to have become standard in American legal education” (Journal of Legal Education). Along with it, Langdell standardized the first-year curriculum, introduced the Socratic approach, and brought in class rankings (Harvard Law School).

The method’s rough reception

Langdell’s innovations were not welcomed at the time. His methods were so shocking to the reigning lecture model that there was an exodus of students from Harvard, many fleeing to the newly founded Boston University Law School (Harvard Law School). And Langdell’s vaunted meritocracy had sharp limits: he was vigorously opposed to the admission of women, and women started applying in the 1870s, 1890s, and 1910s without success — what the school’s historian calls “gender apartheid” held until 1950, when women were finally admitted (Harvard Law School).

Entangled with the nation’s divides

The school’s history tracks the country’s own ruptures. Joseph Story — appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court at 32 and serving on the Court while he was Dane Professor of Law at HLS — sought to turn the school into a national institution, but the divide over slavery kept getting in the way: in 1842, Story enforced the Fugitive Slave Act in the Prigg case, sending a mother and her two children back into slavery, a decision the school’s historian frames not as support for the institution but as what Story thought was “the price of a nation” (Harvard Law School). A decade later, HLS teacher Edward Greely Loring — also a federal magistrate in Boston — ordered the return of fugitive slave Anthony Burns to Virginia under the same Act in 1854; rioters stormed the courthouse in a failed rescue attempt, Burns’s freedom was later ransomed, and the Harvard Board of Overseers refused to renew Loring’s appointment (Harvard Law School).

The Civil War tore the student body apart: Joseph Story had recruited from across the country, and as the war approached nearly half the students were from Southern states (Harvard Law School). The school’s own historical account reports that more leaders of the Confederacy were alumni of Harvard Law School than of any other school in the country besides West Point, and that as many as 74 graduates may have died fighting for the Union and 54 for the Confederacy (Harvard Law School).

Later figures carry their own contradictions. Roscoe Pound, dean from 1916 to 1936 and an innovative legal scholar who pushed to internationalize the school, held an advanced degree in botany but no law degree — and in 1934 accepted an honorary degree from the University of Berlin, at a time when Hitler had been chancellor of Germany for one year (Harvard Law School). The school’s first Asian-American graduates came through Hawaii: the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 barred Chinese from citizenship, extended to all Asians by 1924, but Hawaii’s annexation made its residents U.S. citizens — including Hiram Fong, class of 1935, the first Asian-American elected to the U.S. Senate and the first U.S. senator from Hawaii (Harvard Law School).

The school’s graduate study has its own lineage: the law school faculty recommended a graduate year in 1909–1910, authorized by the Harvard Corporation in 1910; the degree designation settled on S.J.D., Doctor of Juridical Science, the school’s highest graduate degree; the first graduate student, Eldon Revare James, entered in fall 1911 and received the S.J.D. in 1912; and the LL.M. (Master of Laws) was introduced in 1923 (Journal of Legal Education).

The 2017 reckoning

On a clear, windy afternoon in early September 2017, at the opening of its bicentennial observance, Harvard Law School unveiled a memorial on campus to the enslaved people whose labor had made its founding possible (Harvard Law School). The plaque, affixed to a large stone at the crossroads in the center of the law school plaza — placed where “everyone travels,” in Dean John Manning’s words — reads: “In honor of the enslaved whose labor created wealth that made possible the founding of Harvard Law School. May we pursue the highest ideals of law and justice in their memory” (Harvard Law School). The inscription was drafted by Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and Harvard professor Annette Gordon-Reed, who noted that in this case, unlike most memorials, the names of the honored could not be listed: “we will never know all of the names of all of the Africans enslaved in Antigua and in the United States” (Harvard Law School).

Manning was explicit at the unveiling: “Our school was founded with wealth generated through the profoundly immoral institution of slavery. We should not hide that fact nor hide from it” (Smithsonian Magazine). As part of the same reckoning, Harvard removed the Royall family’s crest from the law school seal (Smithsonian Magazine).

A noted alumnus and teacher

One of the school’s alumni is Amir Ali, who received his J.D., magna cum laude, from Harvard Law School in 2011 and has served as Director of the school’s Criminal Justice Appellate Clinic since 2018 (The White House). Ali went on to the federal bench, nominated by President Biden in January 2024 to the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia (The White House).

What this profile does not claim

This profile does not state current enrollment or faculty numbers, or the sitting dean’s name, because no fully read source confirmed them. It does not claim Harvard Law School is the oldest continuously operating law school in the nation — that superlative depends on rival schools’ closure histories and was not independently verified; only the 1817 opening is asserted. The founding-resistance and slavery-reckoning sections rest on the sources cited (the school’s own accounts, Smithsonian, and the Journal of Legal Education); quotes from Manning and Gordon-Reed are reported as those sources present them. Details of the Belinda Sutton Quadrangle renaming were not read in full and are not included.