Best JD Prep? A Liberal Arts Degree

An Interview with Harvard Law Dean Martha Minow

“When I was at Harvard Law School, I had a teacher who changed my life: Martha Minow.”
That compliment would justify any teacher’s career. But it didn’t come from just any student. It came from the future President of the United States: Barack Obama.
For 33 years, Martha Minow has been part of the Harvard Law community, taking the reins as dean in 2009. Ironically, she earned her JD from Yale (though she completed her Master’s in education at Harvard). In her time, she has helped oversee changes to Harvard Law’s vaunted 1L curriculum and written or co-edited 14 books (not including her many scholarly research articles).
So what still drives her? How have the law and legal education changed over the past 30 years? What were her biggest mistakes? Those were some of the questions Christina Pazzanese asked in a recent interview with Dean Minow in the Harvard Gazette. Here are some of her answers:
Q: During your formative years, what really interested you?
A: I am so very much affected by being a child of the ’60s. I grew up in a tumultuous time — the Civil Rights Movement, the women’s movement. [Last] year being the [50th] anniversary of JFK’s death brought back to mind how much a part of my childhood [were] the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr., John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Medgar Evers. That was a very big part of my life. I wrote poems about it; it was a thing I thought about. So I don’t know if I was thinking in career terms or not, but my life was going to have to deal with issues of social injustice and that’s what my life was going to be.
Q: You attended Harvard Graduate School of Education before heading to Yale Law School. What drew you to the law and specifically to human rights, family law, and education law?
A: In high school I had worked on social service activities and school reform seemed to me a very important area, to remedy the gulf between the haves and the have-nots. So it wasn’t a big leap to then think about studying social policy. I actually was torn between three options for graduate school. I didn’t want to go to law school. I thought about philosophy and public policy and education — applied to three programs, admitted to all of them, I thought I’d do all of them. I started with the Education School. It was the second year of busing in Boston. I worked for the master for the Delaware desegregation case; I worked on several other big projects. I became the project director for an assessment of the second year of Boston busing and it was pretty clear to me that I needed to have a law degree if I really wanted to participate in those issues.
Q: How have you changed and how has Harvard Law School changed since you first joined the faculty in 1981?
A: I think it’s a very continuous place in some ways but a very, very different one in others. We just this fall had Celebration 60, marking the 60th year of the admission of women. I joined the faculty 33 years ago … [which is] still in recent memory, and now it’s a very different experience: Just about 50 percent women students, not enough women on the faculty, but many more than when I joined. But more significantly, I think the School is more diverse intellectually. There are many more disciplinary approaches to law. History of philosophy, psychology, political science, linguistics, biology. That’s made it an even more exciting place intellectually.
And it’s more global. It’s always been global in some respects, but the student body is much more international and the faculty is more international and my own teaching is a reflection of this. There I was, teaching a very domestic subject — how the federal courts process works — but case after case involved parties from around the world, issues of law and procedure from other places, facts that occurred outside. In terms of pedagogy, we have some lecture classes, but most of our teaching is much more question-and-answer based. But the idea that the professor has an answer and will not tell you what it is is very unusual here and it used to be much more typical. Now we have team projects and professors explaining here’s why we’re doing what we’re doing while asking questions. When I started here, there was a small clinical program giving students the opportunity to represent low-income clients and now we have 27 clinics. The Law School has a justice mission and that’s something that makes me very proud and something I know the students feel very passionately about.
Q: What are students today like and how are they similar or dissimilar from when you first started teaching?
A: The students are spectacular. I’m blown away regularly by what they know, how hard they work, the kinds of aspirations they have, their willingness to collaborate. I have many more students from other parts of the world than I used to. I just finished teaching constitutional law and to have in the class someone who’s an expert in the European Union and someone who clerked at the Israel Supreme Court, someone whose first law degree is from China and someone who practiced law in Australia — it enriches the class; it’s really quite terrific.
The students now are generous, collaborative. They share notes with each other. I regularly ask students what has surprised them about Harvard Law School and almost always the response is how nice everybody is. I think the degree to which the students care about the world is very impressive to me. They are not just concerned about themselves. And there’s a current mood of entrepreneurship and “let’s create our own things”that’s very palpable and very impressive and I’ve tried to support it as dean. Even those that we can’t give support for financially, we give support intellectually and connect them with people outside the School. … all that is increasing a sense of we are not just on planet Law School, we’re on planet Earth and we’re part of a larger project.
To read the complete interview, click on the link below.
Source: Harvard Gazette

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