Thursday, June 11, 2009

Dean Minow!

Not legal history news, per se, but news about a friend of legal history: Martha Minow has been named Dean of Harvard Law School. From the announcement:

A member of the Law School faculty since 1981, Minow is a distinguished legal scholar with interests that range from international human rights to equality and inequality, from religion and pluralism to managing mass tort litigation, from family law and education law to the privatization of military, schooling, and other governmental activities. She is also a widely admired teacher who chaired the Law School’s curricular reform efforts of recent years and was recognized with the School’s Sacks-Freund Award for Teaching Excellence in 2005.

“Martha Minow has been an intellectual leader, a devoted teacher and mentor, a collaborative colleague, and an exemplary institutional citizen across her nearly three decades of service on the Harvard Law School faculty,” said Faust in announcing the appointment. “She’s a scholar of remarkable intelligence, imagination, and scope, with a passion for legal education and a deep sense of how the law can serve essential public purposes. She has played an important and influential role in the institutional life of the Law School and the University over the years, and I am delighted that she has agreed to serve as dean during a critical time in the long and storied history of the School.”
Minow's many publications include Between Vengeance and Forgiveness: Facing History After Genocide and Mass Violence (1998), and Making All the Difference: Inclusion, Exclusion, and American Law (1990). Her newest book, with Jody Freeman, is Government by Contract: Outsourcing and American Democracy (2009). And in a great service to the rest of the academy, she co-edited with Michael Ryan and Austin Sarat, a volume of key works by the deeply missed legal historian Robert Cover, Narrative, Violence, and the Law: The Essays of Robert Cover (1995).

Congratulations!