An Indian-American was named President of the Harvard Law Review

Apsara Iyer is the first Indian-American woman to lead the  prestigious publication in its 136-year history after being chosen as its 137th president.

The 29-year-old Harvard Law School student who has been looking into art crime and repatriation since 2018 succeeds Priscila Coronado.

Since joining the Law Review, I’ve been inspired by her (Priscila’s) leadership, compassion, and ability to create vibrant, inclusive communities. I am grateful that we, ‘Volume 137,’ have inherited her legacy, and I am honored to continue building on this important work over the next year, “Iyer said in a statement announcing her appointment.

Iyer earned a B.A. in Economics, Math, and Spanish from Yale in 2016. Her commitment to archaeology and indigenous cultures prompted her to seek an MPhil at Oxford as a Clarendon Scholar and, in 2018, to join the Manhattan District Attorney’s Antiquities Trafficking Unit (ATU), as per the Harvard Law Review statement.

She worked with federal and international law enforcement officials to return more than 1,100 stolen works of art to 15 different nations while conducting art crime investigations at the ATU.

Iyer, a member of the South Asian Law Students Association and a student in the international human rights clinic at Harvard Law School, began her studies there in the autumn of 2020.

Iyer, dedicated to preventing illegal antiquities trafficking, took a leave of absence from Harvard Law School in 2021–2022 to return to the DA’s Office, where she worked on an international antiquities trafficking investigation and progressed to become the ATU deputy.

“Apsara has made many editors’ lives beautiful, and I have no doubt that she will continue to do so. Her outstanding brilliance, thoughtfulness, compassion, and tenacious advocacy have made an immediate impression on her fellow editors. Her leadership of this organization is a great blessing for the Law Review “According to Iyer’s predecessor, Coronado.

The Law Review, the largest circulation of any law journal in the world, is entirely student-edited. Louis D. Brandeis, LLB 1887, a future justice of the Supreme Court, founded it.

The journal’s first Black president was the former President Barack Obama.