Last month, 24-year-old Harvard Law School student Priscila Coronado was elected by her peers to be the 136th President of the prestigious student-run Harvard Law Review, elevating a Latina to this position for the first time. Outstanding figures in politics and law have worked at the journal, including President Barack Obama and three serving members of the U.S. Supreme Court. The first woman to become president of the Review was Susan Estrich, elected in 1977, and the first Latino to occupy this post was Andrew Crespo, elected in 2007.
Priscila Coronado, from California, is the daughter of Mexican immigrants and the first in her family to attend college. She graduated magna cum laude from the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), earning a BA in English. According to an interview published in Harvard Law Today (Feb 2, 2022), her decision to attend law school is due to her passion for reading, writing and research, her desire to make meaningful change, and her experience working at the Disability Rights Legal Center in Los Angeles. She is interested in education law, particularly special education law, and has been involved with student organizations for first-generation, lower-income students and for Latinx students.
Coronado’s goal for her year as President of the Review is to maintain its legacy of stability and excellence, while at the same time working towards further diversifying its board of editors. She believes that “diversity is essential to our mission of publishing rigorous scholarship,” since a greater variety of backgrounds and experiences provides better peer review and encourages the publication of cutting-edge research. She is honored to be entrusted with this position, and feels that her background - growing up in an immigrant, working class household – have fundamentally shaped her perspectives on the law.1
In January of this year, Harvard’s 148-year-old student newspaper, the Harvard Crimson, got its first Hispanic president. The newspaper describes itself as “the oldest continuously published daily college newspaper,” and distinguished national figures have been among its editors, including Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy and more than 25 Pulitzer Prize winners.2
Raquel Coronell Uribe, a Harvard student majoring in History and Literature, has worked at the Harvard Crimson covering police accountability and other issues, and has also been the publication’s social media manager. She was selected as President of the newspaper after a long application process that included an essay and various interviews. In an interview with NPR (Nov. 15, 2021), Coronell calls her appointment “a huge honor,” and hopes that it will open the door to more Hispanic leadership of the Crimson in the future. She aims to make the publication more inclusive, and to focus on digital innovation; she also describes the inspiration she derives from working with a group of brilliant fellow students who are passionate about journalism.
Coronell’s own passion for journalism has been influenced by her parents, both journalists from Colombia who were forced to flee to the U.S. when she was 6 years old due to the death threats her father received because of his work as an investigative reporter. The fact that people are willing to go to great lengths to hide the truth made her realize the importance of uncovering these truths, and of providing information that helps people understand the reality around them and make informed decisions.3
1. Rachel Reed, “Q&A with Priscila Coronado ’23, Harvard Law Review’s first Latina president”, Harvard Law Today, February 2, 2022, at: https://today.law.harvard.edu/qa-with-priscila-coronado-23-harvard-law-reviews-first-latina-president/
2. “About the Harvard Crimson”, at: https://www.thecrimson.com/about/
3. Joe Hernández, “Harvard’s 148-year-old student newspaper gets its first Latina president”, NPR, November 15, 2021, at: https://www.npr.org/2021/11/15/1055870011/harvard-crimson-first-latina-president-coronell-uribe
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