The Harvard Law Review, for only the second time in its 137-year history, will be led by a Black woman after the prestigious law journal elected a Virginian focused on studying racial and class inequality in the legal system as its newest president.
Harvard Law School student Sophia Hunt, 26, in an interview on Wednesday described herself as a budding academic with a passion for criminal defense work, whose studies were influenced by the racial justice movement that emerged following the high-profile killings of Black people by police in recent years.
She was in high school when in 2014 Michael Brown, a Black teen, was killed by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, helping fuel the growth of the movement during the "formative years of my political and social awakening," she said.
"That definitely sparked my initial curiosity and understanding of mass incarceration, which influenced my studies," she said.
Law reviews are staffed by U.S. law schools' top students, who are often recruited for judicial clerkships and other prestigious jobs in the profession.
Legal and political luminaries who have worked at the Harvard Law Review include former President Barack Obama, who was named the journal's first Black president in 1990. Three current members of the U.S. Supreme Court have served as editors.
The review's first female president, Susan Estrich, was elected in 1977. The first Black woman in that role, ImeIme Umana, took the top spot in 2017.
Hunt was elected on Saturday to succeed Apsara Iyer, the first Indian-American woman selected to lead the Law Review. Iyer in a statement called Hunt a "visionary scholar and editor who has exhibited unparalleled dedication to the Law Review."
Like the university itself, the Harvard Law Review has found itself caught up in campus tensions over the Israel-Hamas war.
An editor who acted as a safety marshal at a pro-Palestinian demonstration was identified online by name after appearing in a viral video of protesters confronting a Jewish student.
Several editors also went public to criticize a vote by a majority of their colleagues not to publish a blog post by a Palestinian scholar describing the conflict in Gaza a genocide. It was instead published by The Nation.
The Law Review after the incident said that it had "rigorous editorial processes governing how it solicits, evaluates, and determines when and whether to publish a piece."
Asked about that incident, Hunt in the interview said she was "dedicated to leveraging the diversity and vast backgrounds of our editors to identify areas that we should be talking about and that are often neglected."
After earning a degree in history and literature from Harvard University in 2019, Hunt began pursuing a sociology PhD at Stanford University, where she has been researching race and class inequities in the criminal legal system.
Beginning in 2022, Hunt took a leave from Stanford to earn a law degree from Harvard, saying she realized what she found most fulfilling was advocating on behalf of other people and "talking to those most impacted by the carceral state."
She said she was interested in public criminal defense work and potentially academia, which runs in the family. Her mother is a professor of business administration at the University of Virginia.
Hunt clerked last year for the federal public defender office in Washington, D.C., and plans this coming summer to work with the Brooklyn Defender Services, a public defense office in New York.
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