Martha Minow has been stepping down as dean of Harvard Law School at the end of the academic year. The school has announced on December 3, Tuesday that she will remain as a member of the faculty.

Minow has been serving as dean since 2008, beyond the five-year tenure she had planned initially, said Robb London, the law school spokesman. After a strong year of fund-raising and admissions, Minow thought that the time was right to turn over the reins.

Minow, who joined the Harvard Law school in 1981, has planned to remain on the faculty and spend some more time researching and speaking about issues, that include inequality, discrimination, and access to legal services for the poor.

Minow’s tenure had been marked by upheaval in the world of legal education, as diminished job opportunities after the recession has spurred a sharp decline in law school applications.

Minow said in a phone interview with the Globe, “A law school today needs to prepare people to learn — because the world is going to continue to change — to analyze, and also to work collaboratively across different disciplines and domains,” .

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As dean, Minow has added cross-disciplinary programs and clinics in areas like criminal law and policy, immigration, and the requirements of military veterans. She has overseen an expansion of business-related programs that has focused on financial literacy and entrepreneurship.

Over the past year, the campus has faced several controversy when a group of law students had waged a successful campaign to change the school’s logo, that contained elements of former slave-holding family’s coat of arms. In another incident, someone put black tape over the photographs of black professors that hang at the school’s Wasserstein Hall.

By Prakriti neogi