Dean's Welcome
Welcome to the website of the Harvard Law School.
This website is a window into the vibrancy, energy, and excitement of Harvard Law School. It is a window into the rich diversity of people, perspectives, and opinions found in this place. It is a window into the School's deep pools of talent.
You'll discover in moving through this website that Harvard Law School is a big city, not a small town. It is a place of continual activity, constant surprise, and unrelenting vitality. The array of experiences and opportunities that the Law School offers has no parallel in legal education. The range of academic and extracurricular activities, along with the variety of faculty and students, make each day a potential adventure.
Harvard Law School provides in its classrooms, clinical settings, and extracurricular activities an extraordinary educational experience. If you are a student here, the School will expect much of you; from the very first day of class, it will challenge you to think and do things you didn't know you could. It will reward you by exposing you to ideas that will captivate and inspire you, by teaching you skills and ways of thought that will serve as the foundation of your career, and by making possible relationships, with both faculty and fellow students, that will enrich and even change your life.
Harvard Law School's commitment to rigorous and exciting legal training is intimately connected to the School's commitment to pathbreaking scholarship. Harvard Law School serves as home to the most intellectually interesting and diverse faculty in the nation. Using a wide range of methodologies and bringing to bear insights from numerous other academic disciplines, the faculty of Harvard Law School plumbs the depths of everything from constitutional doctrines and international legal structures to systems of taxation and regimes of corporate governance. And students share in this intellectual richness, working with professors in their core research endeavors and debating in class their latest theories.
In all this activity--in the School's teaching and research alike--engagement with the world is a key feature and object. Harvard Law School is a place for people who love ideas because ideas make a difference, who want to think about the law's interaction with public policy, who care about how things work and how to improve them, who wish to avail themselves of the diverse opportunities that the legal profession offers to serve the public. The Law School's faculty regularly argue cases before the Supreme Court, testify before Congress, and advise developing nations on how to create effective legal systems. The Law School's students work during the year and in the summers for human rights groups abroad, DC-based public interest organizations, and Boston-area prosecutors' offices, as well as for the nation's most significant law firms and businesses. The Law School's alumni are an astonishing collection of individuals--leaders in every part of the legal profession, in all branches of government, in academia, in for-profit companies and non-profit organizations. At Harvard Law School, and for all these people connected with it, the study of law is not an arid intellectual exercise. The study of law matters, and this is what gives Harvard Law School its sense of purpose and mission.
I hope that you enjoy your visit to the Harvard Law School website and that it moves you to visit our real, not virtual, campus. As much as we may try to convey here the Harvard Law School experience, it is even better live and in person.
Elena Kagan