Harvard Law School (HLS) is the law school of Harvard University

10 min readMay 7, 2021

Harvard Law School (HLS) is the law school of Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1817, it is the oldest continuously operating law school in the United States and one of the most prestigious in the world.[6][7]

Each class in the three-year JD program has approximately 560 students, among the largest of the top 150 ranked law schools in the United States.[8] The first-year class is broken into seven sections of approximately 80 students, who take most first-year classes together. Harvard’s uniquely large class size and prestige have led the law school to graduate a great many distinguished alumni in the judiciary, government, and the business world.

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]

Harvard Law School’s founding is traditionally linked to the funding of Harvard’s first professorship in law, paid for from a bequest from the estate of Isaac Royall Jr., a colonial American landowner and slaveholder. Today, HLS is home to the largest academic law library in the world[13][14] as well as 391 faculty members.[3]

History[edit]

Bequest by Isaac Royall, founding, and relationship with slavery[edit]

Harvard Law School’s founding is traced to the establishment of a “law department” at Harvard in 1817.[15] Dating the founding to the year of the creation of the law department makes Harvard Law the oldest continuously-operating law school in the nation. William & Mary Law School opened first in 1779, but closed due to the American Civil War, reopening in 1920.[16] The University of Maryland School of Law was chartered in 1816, but did not begin classes until 1824, and also closed during the Civil War.[17]

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 slaveowner Isaac Royall, Jr., in 1817.[15] Royall left roughly 1,000 acres of land in Massachusetts to Harvard when he died in exile in Nova Scotia, where he fled as a British 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.”[18] 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.[18] The Royalls were so involved in the slave trade, that “the labor of slaves underwrote the teaching of law in Cambridge.”[19] 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 coat-of-arms, which shows three stacked wheat sheaves on a blue background, was adopted as the school crest in 1936, topped with the university motto (Veritas, Latin “truth”).[20] 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 seal.[21] In March 2016, following requests by students, the school decided to remove the emblem because of its association with slavery;[22] it has yet to design a replacement seal.[21] In November 2019, Harvard announced that a working group had been tasked to develop a new seal.[23]

Portrait of Isaac Royall, painted in 1769 by John Singleton Copley

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.[24]

Growth and the Langdell curriculum[edit]

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.”[25] 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.[26] 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.[27] In 1869, HLS also eliminated examination requirements.[27]

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.[28][29]

20th century: institutional criticism[edit]

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.”[30] When Langdell developed the original law school curriculum, Harvard President Charles Eliot told him to make it “hard and long.”[31][32] 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.”[33] Scott Turow’s memoir One L and John Jay Osborn’s novel The Paper Chase describe such an environment.

In addition, 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.”[34]

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.”[35] 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,[36] 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[32] 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.”[35]

Harvard Law School (HLS) is the law school of Harvard University

Contents

History[edit]

Bequest by Isaac Royall, founding, and relationship with slavery[edit]

Growth and the Langdell curriculum[edit]

20th century: institutional criticism[edit]

Written by Vexare