/cloudfront-us-east-2.images.arcpublishing.com/reuters/BIO7XE2FSFNEDJXVJLWEM5W7FY.jpg)
Students and pedestrians walk through the Yard at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S. REUTERS/Brian Snyder
Aug 25 - Harvard Law School has unveiled its new seal, six years after students pushed to have the previous one removed because it honored the family of a prominent slave owner who was an early donor to the school.
Harvard Law hasn’t had an official seal since 2016, when a committee recommended that the controversial seal be removed from campus and replaced with a new one. But that effort languished until 2020, when the law school formed a working group to design a new seal. That group, chaired by well-known law professor and historian Annette Gordon-Reed, gathered input from students and alumni and conducted more than a dozen focus groups on what people wanted from the new seal.
The result uses Harvard’s signature red, with the university’s “veritas” motto – which was featured in the previous seal – atop the Latin phrase “lex et iustitia,” which translates to “law and justice.” Below are eight curved lines that are intended to evoke architectural details from the Cambridge law campus.
“I believe that the simple, elegant, and beautiful design of the new shield captures the complexity, the diversity, the limitlessness, the transformative power, the strength, and the energy that the HLS community, in Cambridge and throughout the world, sees in Harvard Law School,” wrote law dean John Manning in an email to the law school community.
Gordon-Reed said in an interview posted to the law school’s website that the radiating curved lines in the new seal are also meant to represent the school’s sphere of influence in the world and the many things its graduates do.
“Actually, I think it’s suggestive of a jewel, as well,” said Gordon-Reed, who also served on the 2016 committee that studied the previous shield and ultimately recommended it be replaced. Gordon-Reed, however, disagreed with that recommendation and instead argued that the school should maintain the seal and tie it to a “historically sound interpretive narrative” about the true origins of the law school.
The retired seal – in use since 1936 – featured three sheaths of wheat, drawn from the family coat of arms of Isaac Royall Jr, who made a donation to Harvard in 1779 that established the first endowed professorship in law. (The law school itself was not formally established until 1817.) The Royall family’s wealth was partially derived from a plantation in Antigua, which relied on slave labor.
A book about the history of Harvard Law placed new attention on Royall’s involvement, and in 2015 law students formed a group called Royall Must Fall to call for the removal of the seal. At the time, the law school was also embroiled in controversy after an unknown individual placed black tape over the eyes of all Black faculty members in their official campus photographs. Some students said the defacement highlighted the prevalence of racism on campus.
"To me, the new shield is one small reflection of the hundreds of hours of work that my classmates, especially my Black classmates, put into challenging the role of the legal academy in perpetuating racial injustice," said Sean Cuddihy, a 2016 Harvard law graduate who was active with Royall Must Fall.
Read more:
Q&A: Harvard Law professor on why the school should keep the shield
Harvard to scrap law school seal associated with slavery
Update: A comment from a member of the Royall Must Fall group was added to this story.
"seal" - Google News
August 26, 2021 at 01:33AM
https://ift.tt/3gyRd6b
Harvard Law rolls out new seal after ditching one with slavery ties - Reuters
"seal" - Google News
https://ift.tt/3c1qdrW
https://ift.tt/2SzWv5y
No comments:
Post a Comment