Harvard Law School Dean Martha L. Minow has appointed a committee to review the school’s seal, which depicts the crest of the Royalls, a former slaveholding family whose estate helped found the school, according to The Harvard Crimson.

Minow told Law School affiliates in an email last week that she appointed a committee to “lead research into, and a community discussion, of whether to continue using the HLS shield,’’ the Crimson reported.

The committee will be led by law professor Bruce H. Mann, and will include professors Tomiko Brown-Nagin, Annette Gordon-Reed, Janet E. Halley, and Samuel Moyn, as well as two students and an alumnus.


A group of students, which named their movement “Royall Must Fall,’’ first called for the removal of the school’s seal in late October.

“We ask our own administration to stand in solidarity with the protesters of South Africa, decolonize Harvard Law, and honor the enslaved people who actually founded this school,’’ the group wrote on its Facebook page.

The decision to officially form the committee came with broader concerns about the school’s unwelcoming environment when portraits of black professors were defaced with black tape on November 19.