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