[HLS Notable Graduates]

Some of HLS's most notable graduates include:

• Rutherford B. Hayes (1845), 19th president of the United States,
• George Lewis Ruffin (1869), the first African-American graduate of Harvard Law School
• Charles Hamilton Houston (1922), a mentor of Thurgood Marshal and known as "The Man Who Killed Jim Crow" (he set out to become a principal architect of the legal strategy to dismantle segregation laws)
• William Colement Jr. (1946), went on to become the first African-American to serve as a law clerk at the United States Supreme Court; he was a key strategist in the litigation that ultimately resulted in the S.C.'s ruling in Brown v. Board of Education
• Ruth Bader Ginsburg (enrolled in 1956, transferred to Columbia), was only 1 of 9 women in a class of about 500 men; went on to become an Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court in 1993
• Mitt Romney (1975), would go on to become the Governor of Massachusetts and then the Republican nominee for President in 2012
• Loretta Lynch (1984), became the first African-American woman to be Attorney General of the United States
• Michelle Robinson Obama (1988), attended HLS after graduating from Princeton; went on to be the First Lady of the United States alongside her husband Barack Obama
• Barack Obama (1991), was elected as the first black president of the Harvard Law Review in 1990; later represented Illinois in the U.S. Senate, and in 2008 was elected the 44th President of the United States in addition to being the first African-American president