Events 2026-27

Harvey C. Mansfield, William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Government (Emeritus), teaches and writes about political philosophy. He arrived at Harvard in 1949 as an undergraduate and joined the Harvard faculty in 1962 where he has remained for 5 decades. He has written on Edmund Burke and the nature of political parties, on Machiavelli and the invention of indirect government, in defense of a defensible liberalism, and in favor of a Constitutional American political science. He has also written on executive power and has translated three books of Machiavelli’s and Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. His book Manliness was published by Yale University Press in 2006.  Please join for lunch with Professor Mansfield and HLS Lecturer Alan Raul, both members of the Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard, where Professor Mansfield will make remarks on viewpoint diversity at Harvard, engage with Professor Raul, and take audience questions. Harvard Law students, faculty, and Harvard ID holders all welcome. Lunch boxes will be provided courtesy of the Society for the Rule of Law. We kindly request that you Register for Lunch so that we may gauge catering.

This year’s gerrymandering wars are the most vicious in recent memory. Nobel Prize winning economist, Eric Maskin, who contends that the country’s traditional voting system distorts how citizens are represented, argues that gerrymandering exploits and worsens these distortions and that changing how Americans vote could make election results fairer. Come learn a little about other possible voting systems– European-style proportional representation, majority-rule voting (like ranked choice voting), and multi-member districting—and explore with him how each method would play out in the U.S. context to produce more truly representative electoral results. Lunch will be provided. Registration Required.

As the mid-term elections near and states face a flurry of redistricting efforts, questions about their legality, partisanship, and implementation loom large. Join Professor Nicholas Stephanopoulus (Director of Strategy at the HLS Election Law Clinic and Kirkland & Ellis Professor of Law) and HLS Clinical Professor Ruth Greenwood (Director of the Election Law Clinic) – both of whom have litigated gerrymandering cases all the way to the Supreme Court – for a discussion of where things currently stand, what to expect in November, and how partisan gerrymandering may affect future election cycles. Bring your questions and concerns and be a part of this timely inquiry!  Lunch will be provided. Registration Required.

Bring your laptops and your appetite and join Debbie Ginsberg of HLSL’s Research Services team for a demonstration of the AI tools currently available to law students. Law students at Harvard have access to many AI research products –  from Lexis Protege to Chat GPT.  We’ll explore these products together LIVE and discover what their strengths are as well as their limitations.  We’ll examine AI products from Lexis, Westlaw, Bloomberg, and the HU Sandbox.  Since we’ll be conducting hands-on demonstrations, be sure that your database passwords are working! If you are an HLS student and you don’t have access to Lexis, Westlaw, and Bloomberg, please contact [email protected]. Lunch will be provided. Registration Required.

This panel will engage with the edited collection Lawyering for Liberation: A Toolbox for Movement Lawyers, an approachable how-to guide which distills key concepts of movement lawyering. Assembling advice from dozens of lawyers, legal workers, and organizers in areas like jail and bail support, stop-and-frisk litigation, protester defense, reparations, family law, and housing, the panel features volume editors Ameca Reali and Marbré Stahly-Butts and contributor S. Mandisa Moore-O’Neal. All three bring with them years of experience working as movement lawyers and this discussion will provide students with the opportunity to learn about key aspects of their work, their insights into movement lawyering, and what movement lawyering needs today and in the future. Registration Required. Lunch will be provided. This session is co-sponsored by the Harvard Human Rights Journal and the Center for Health Law and Policy Innovation.

Whether within the United States or around the world, the construction of “public memory” is both important (especially to political leaders seeking to shape a particular civic consciousness) and controversial.  Who Tells Your Story (a title taken from Lin-Manuel Miranda’s culture-shaping musical about Alexander Hamilton as myth and symbol) is a collection of essays, edited by visiting professor Sanford Levinson, that examines various answers both within the United States and abroad.  How, for example, should Eastern European countries, including Ukraine, integrate the story of the Soviet struggle against Nazi Germany, into its national narratives—including, of course, maintaining monuments to Soviet leaders and soldiers?  We are all familiar with controversies surrounding the memorialization of Confederate “heroes.”  But what particular stories should we tell about, among others, Thomas Jefferson or Martin Luther King?  Discussing these, and other examples, will be Professors Levinson, Randall Kennedy (who contributed an essay on King), and Annette Gordon-Reed, the author of ground-breaking books on Jefferson and the editor more recently of a collection of materials on Jefferson and race. Join for lunch and what promises to be a fascinating discussion! The first 25 folks through the door will also get a copy of the book! Registration required.

What is a local LLM and why would they be useful? In this session, we’ll explore how local LLMs can be used for document analysis and research, discuss why you might use them instead of a commercial LLM, and demonstrate how to build your own local LLM. Please bring your computers for this session. You should install Ollama, a program that lets you download and run local models. You can download a small model to test if you’d like. We’ll explore how to pick, install, and run a local model. – REGISTRATION REQUIRED

Bring your laptops and your appetite and join Debbie Ginsberg of HLSL’s Research Services team for a demonstration of the AI tools currently available to law students. Law students at Harvard have access to many AI research products –  from Lexis Protege to Chat GPT.  We’ll explore these products together LIVE and discover what their strengths are as well as their limitations.  We’ll examine AI products from Lexis, Westlaw, Bloomberg, and the HU Sandbox.  Since we’ll be conducting hands-on demonstrations, be sure that your database passwords are working! If you are an HLS student and you don’t have access to Lexis, Westlaw, and Bloomberg, please contact [email protected]. Lunch will be provided. Registration Required.

Getting ready to write your appellate brief this spring but have no real idea how to format it properly? Come get help from our faculty research librarian, Debbie Ginsberg, who specializes in leveraging technology for all things law! She’ll cover using styles,  creating a table of contents, adding Roman and Arabic numbers to the same document, and creating a table of authorities. If you have other questions about how to effectively use Word in your legal research and writing, she’s the one to ask. So bring your laptops, your questions, and your appetites and get these skills under your belt before you need to turn anything in! Lunch will be provided. Registration Required.