March 3, 2014 – Raj Banerjee
This March, Harvard Law School will celebrate International Women’s Day by featuring a series of portraits of inspirational women lawyers and policy makers from around the world. For two weeks beginning March 3, the law school’s Wasserstein Hall will host over sixty portraits of academics, judges, activists, public servants, corporate lawyers and businesswomen, all nominated by members of the law school community.
The portrait series, entitled Inspiring Change, Inspiring Us, grew out of a conversation between members of the Harvard Law &International Development Society (LIDS) and the Harvard Women’s Law Association (WLA) this past winter. Both organizations wanted to commemorate International Women’s Day—celebrated for decades on March 8 of each year—and were looking for ways to collaborate on campus. The idea for a portrait exhibition soon reached Harvard Law School Dean Martha Minow, who offered her unconditional support. In the weeks since then, the portrait series has brought the entire law school community together: dozens of students and faculty members nominated women to be featured in the exhibition; seventeen student organizations have agreed to sponsor portraits; and staff members from the law school’s Dean of Students Office, Communications Office, Facilities Maintenance Operations, Copy Center, and the Harvard Law School Library have invested their time and resources to bring the project to fruition.
The resulting collaboration celebrates women lawyers and policymakers from six continents, from judges in the United States, Brazil, and Botswana to rights activists from across Latin America and Asia; from academics in Australia to corporate lawyers in India to leaders at the United Nations and the European Union. Some of the featured women, such as Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Senator Elizabeth Warren, are household names in the United States. Others are lesser known including women like Bayan Mahmoud Al-Zahran, who has established Saudi Arabia’s first all-female law firm; and Nigerian human rights lawyer Hauwa Ibrahim, a top proponent of women’s rights under Sharia law. For Becky Wolozin, ’15, one of the exhibit’s organizers, “the most exciting nominations were women in students’ knew personally – their mothers, grandmothers, mentors – the unsung heroines in our lives.”
Each woman will be featured on campus and on an online exhibit, at the following website: https://orgs.law.harvard.edu/womeninspiringchange/. The website will also feature podcasts from several nominators, explaining why and how their nominees inspire them.
Inspiring Change, Inspiring Us will be open to the public, and on display from March 3 to March 14. An opening reception will be held on Thursday, March 6, at Milstein West, in Harvard Law School’s Wasserstein Hall, from 11am to 1pm. The reception is open to all members of the Harvard community.
For more information on the exhibition, please visit https://orgs.law.harvard.edu/womeninspiringchange or receive updates via Twitter @HarvardLIDS or by looking for the hashtags #HLSinspiringchange and #inspiringchange.
LIDS and WLA, the student groups behind the exhibition, would like to thank Dean Martha Minow; Harvard Law School’s Dean of Students Ellen Cosgrove and her staff; and staff at the school’s Communications Office, Facilities Maintenance Operations, Copy Center, and the Harvard Law School Library.
The exhibition is largely funded by a generous grant from the Harvard Law School Milbank Tweed fund.