Each class in the three-year JD program has approximately 560 students, which is among the largest of the top 150 ranked law schools in the United States.

William & Mary Law School opened first in 1779, but it closed due to the American Civil War, reopening in 1920.

[13] Royall left roughly 1,000 acres of land in Massachusetts to Harvard when he died in exile in Nova Scotia, where he fled to as a 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.

"[13] 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.

[17] 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 arms.

In 2019, the government of Antigua and Barbuda requested reparations from Harvard Law School on the grounds that it benefitted from Royall's enslavement of people in the country.

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.

"[28] When Langdell developed the original law school curriculum, Harvard President Charles Eliot told him to make it "hard and long.

"[29][30] 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.

[32] 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.

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.

"[34] 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,[35] and an inaccessible faculty.

The new curriculum was implemented in stages over the next several years,[36][37] with the last new course, a first-year practice-oriented problem-solving workshop, being instituted in January 2010.

[38] In 2009, Kagan was appointed solicitor general of the United States by President Barack Obama and resigned the deanship.

On June 11, 2009, Harvard University president, Drew Gilpin Faust named Martha Minow as the new dean.

The shield had become a source of contention among a group of law school students, who objected to the Royall family's history of slave ownership.

It features legal arguments, advocacy pieces, applied research, practitioner's notes and other forms of reflections related to human rights law, theory, and practice.

Past presidential candidates who are HLS graduates include Michael Dukakis, Ralph Nader and Mitt Romney.

Eight sitting U.S. senators are alumni of HLS: Romney, Ted Cruz, Mike Crapo, Tim Kaine, Jack Reed, Chuck Schumer, Tom Cotton, and Mark Warner.

Other legal and political leaders who attended HLS include former president of Taiwan, Ma Ying-jeou, and former vice president Annette Lu; the incumbent Prime Minister of Luxembourg, Luc Frieden; former Chief Justice of India, Dhananjaya Y. Chandrachud; the incumbent Chief Justice of the Court of Final Appeal of Hong Kong, Andrew Cheung Kui-nung; former chief justice of the Republic of the Philippines, Renato Corona; Chief Justice of Singapore Sundaresh Menon; former president of the World Bank Group, Robert Zoellick; former United Nations high commissioner for human rights, Navanethem Pillay; the former president of Ireland, Mary Robinson; Lady Arden, Justice of the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom; Solomon Areda Waktolla, Judge of the United Nations Dispute Tribunal, Judge of the Administrative Tribunal of the African Development Bank and Former Deputy Chief Justice of the Federal Supreme Court of Ethiopia.

degree from Harvard Law School and was a recipient of the 2004 Yong K. Kim' 95 Prize of excellence for his dissertation "Democracy in Distress: Is Exile Polity a Remedy?

Past Supreme Court justices from Harvard Law School include Antonin Scalia, David Souter, Harry Blackmun, William J. Brennan, Louis Brandeis, Felix Frankfurter, Lewis Powell (LLM), and Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., among others.

Legal scholars who graduated from Harvard Law include Payam Akhavan, Henry Friendly, William P. Alford, Rachel Barkow, Yochai Benkler, Alexander Bickel, Andrew Burrows, Erwin Chemerinsky, Amy Chua, Sujit Choudhry, Robert C. Clark, Hugh Collins, James Joseph Duane, I. Glenn Cohen, Ronald Dworkin, Christopher Edley Jr., Melvin A. Eisenberg, Susan Estrich, Jody Freeman, Gerald Gunther, Andrew T. Guzman, Louis Henkin, William A. Jacobson, Harold Koh, Richard J. Lazarus, Arthur R. Miller, Gerald L. Neuman, Eric Posner, Richard Posner, John Mark Ramseyer, Jed Rubenfeld, Lewis Sargentich, John Sexton, Jeannie Suk, Kathleen Sullivan, Cass Sunstein, Luke W. Cole, Laurence Tribe, Edwin R. Keedy, C. Raj Kumar[97] and Tim Wu.