Harvard Law School has a history of acrimonious relationships with its administrators, but when Martha Minow was appointed dean this summer the chatter in the faculty canteen was overwhelmingly positive.

“In terms of reactions this was pretty good,” said former Dean Robert C. Clark. “When Dean [Elena] Kagan was appointed there was some griping among the faculty that never got in the press, and certainly when I got appointed there were wild denunciations.”

It’s hardly surprising—Martha Minow has a warm reputation and a smile that comes easily, an endearing quality for one of Harvard’s most prolific legal scholars.

In Cambridge, she’s served for years on the appointments committee that helped poach some of this nation’s most prestigious legal scholars, including Cass Sunstein and Laurence Lessig. She chaired Kagan’s curriculum reform committee that revamped the school’s curriculum. And through all this work, she has shied away from the spotlight.

But in July, at the close of a secretive search process, Minow shed her usual behind the scenes role to succeed Kagan as Dean of the Law School.

Minow steps into the shoes of the most popular Harvard Law School Dean in recent memory. Her predecessor Elena Kagan has been credited with vastly expanding the faculty, presiding over a period of wildly successful fundraising, and healing rifts among faculty after decades of ideological conflict at the school.

“Her shoes are bigger than mine—and she wears heels,” Minow quipped.

But Kagan benefited from an environment far removed from today’s climate of precipitous endowment losses and spending curtailment. Minow faces the unenviable task of reconciling shrinking spending with a period of rapid, immense change in the legal industry that has altered the way law schools operate. As a result, some fear that as the school shrinks its budget, spectres of the school’s ideological battles of the past might resurface.

CHANGING LANDSCAPE

Minow says it was the idea of justice that first drew her to legal scholarship.

“I came to law school because I care about justice,” Minow said. “The question of justice should be present in the classroom, present in the work of scholars, present in the career aspirations. What justice is, of course, is a very complicated matter.”

It’s a passion colleagues like Kennedy School Professor Mary Jo Bane single out as one of Minow’s central qualities.

“I know that she is committed to a culture of public service and a culture of advancing justice,” said Bane, who spoke with Minow shortly before she assumed the Deanship. “I remember that she said, ‘What I really care about is justice, and what a law school ought to be about is justice—and I want to bring the Law School together around that.”

But in the wake of the financial crisis and the subsequent recession, practical pressures once foreign to the school have pushed their way to the fore.

The large firms that traditionally employ scores of Harvard Law graduates have been particularly hard hit by the recession, prompting growing unease among students and administrators.