Media Mentions

Former U.S. presidential candidate and attorney Ralph Nader spoke at the Harvard Law Forum Thursday to discuss the need for more public interest lawyers and his belief in Harvard Law School’s obligation to support public interest careers among its graduates...Katherine J. Thoreson, a third-year law student and editor-in-chief of the Harvard Law Record, said she has worked with Nader before. In addition to being a former editor-in-chief of the publication, he still publishes contributing opinion articles. “He’s just been a very supportive voice in the work that The Record does,” Thoreson said. “I think that he made a lot of salient points about the failures of this institution as well as the power that this institution has to change some of the problems in the legal landscape.” Laurel A. Petrulionis [`21] said she was "inspired" by the end. “I came to law school to make a difference in the world, and through orientation the student government really pushed this notion of challenging the corporate pull,” Laurel A. Petrulionis said.

A course offered by Harvard University Law School for the spring 2019 semester will focus on ways to “push back against” strategies employed by President Donald Trump and Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Harvard professor Laurence Tribe will be teaching the course, titled "Constitutional Strategies For the McConnell/Trump/Kavanaugh Era.”..."Law students who are interested — from whatever ideological perspective — in what the current political and legal landscape might mean for the litigation and/or legislation they may consider becoming involved in (whether defensively or offensively) after they graduate deserve well-informed guidance as they navigate this complex new terrain. My new seminar is designed to offer that guidance," Tribe told Campus Reform in an email.

An op-ed by Susan Crawford. By temperament and by training, I am optimistic most of the time. In that room, though, I sensed the assumptions of our age operating in high, silent gear: Business is the most important agent of change in society; government exists to "cooperate" and is mostly incapable and toothless (while simultaneously, if ineptly, threatening); nothing is going to be done about the harrowing, multiple, structural unfairnesses of our time; women who want to survive and be invited to future panel discussions need to be appropriately deferential; and our destiny as a society is being charted by people who never use public transportation. Or fly commercial. I did speak up, politely, that afternoon. I said many things are profoundly wrong with the way we live in America, and that what we really need to do is make sure government has the capacity and resources to ensure—using technology as a tool, but mostly through sound policy—that everyone with a belly button can lead a thriving life.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. With respect to politics, ours is an age of Manichaeism. Many people think and act as if the forces of light are assembled against the forces of darkness, and the only serious question is this: What side are you on? “Hidden Tribes: A Study of America’s Polarized Landscape” offers an optimistic perspective on how the U.S. might get past that question. Produced by More in Common, an international initiative seeking to reduce social divisions, the report describes seven American “tribes.”

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, rebranded late in her career as the Notorious RBG, has recently been getting all the love due to a pioneering woman Supreme Court justice. But her colleague Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, who announced Tuesday that she is stepping out of public life at age 88 because of creeping dementia, is just as important in the history of the Constitution. Indeed, measured in terms of impact on the court, O’Connor had a much greater historical effect than Ginsburg, much of whose importance so far comes from her pioneering women’s rights work as a litigator.

An op-ed by Yochai Benkler...But research I helped conduct has found that the fundamental driver of disinformation in American politics of the past three years has not been Russia, but Fox News and the insular right-wing media ecosystem it anchors. All the Russians did was jump on the right-wing propaganda bandwagon: Their efforts were small in scope, relative to homegrown media efforts. And what propaganda victories the Russians achieved occurred only when the right-wing media machine picked up stories and, often, embellished them.

An essay by Jeannie Suk Gersen. Nearly a century ago, Harvard College moved away from admitting students based solely on measures of academic performance. In the nineteen-twenties, the concept of diversity in admissions arose in response to the fear of being overrun by Jewish students, who were considered strong on academic metrics but lacking in qualities of character and personality. As the proportion of Jews threatened to exceed a quarter of each class, Harvard’s president, Abbott Lawrence Lowell, proposed limiting Jews to fifteen per cent of the student body. Other Harvard officials balked at such overt discrimination, believing it to be inconsistent with Harvard’s liberal tradition, and, instead, formulated a new, inclusive “policy of equal opportunity” that would lead to the same outcome as Lowell’s proposal. It introduced the consideration of qualitative factors such as personality and background, including “geographical diversity,” as part of the admissions process. Representing the diversity of the country meant recruiting and admitting more Midwestern and Southern students, who counterbalanced the droves of Jewish applicants from the Northeast. By the class of 1930, as a result of the new plan, Jewish students made up only ten per cent of Harvard’s undergraduates.

...In a recent draft paper from which I have taken these numbers, John C Coates of Harvard Law School points out that the big three’s share of any contested vote now tends to be pivotal and that on current trends, even if growth starts to taper off, a majority of the 1,000 largest US companies will be controlled, in effect, by a dozen or fewer people over the next 10 to 20 years. This leads to what he calls the Problem of Twelve, his paper’s title, whereby ownership rights, including the critical right to elect directors, will be in the hands of this tiny group. Even if the growth in passive investing fails to follow the trajectory outlined by Mr Coates, it is clear that there is already a striking concentration of power.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. A South Carolina foster-care agency has asked the Trump administration to rule that it has a constitutional right to discriminate against non-Protestant and gay parents under the religious-freedom guarantee of the First Amendment. Some evangelical Christians will be upset if the agency doesn’t get an exemption from anti-discrimination rules so that it can receive federal money. But other religious groups, not to mention the American Civil Liberties Union and gay-rights organizations, will probably sue if it does. The legal issues are complicated, and it isn’t clear who would win.

...This year’s Harvard Law curriculum includes a class covering entertainment and media law, a course on music and digital media, and an entertainment law clinic to complement its many intellectual-property and contracts-focused classes. Students can also moonlight at the legal services clinic, Recording Artists Project, where they gain hands-on experience working with local musicians. The clinic celebrates its 20th year in October with a gala keynoted by entertainment lawyer and alumnus Donald Passman.

The Financial Times and McKinsey have unveiled the shortlist for the 2018 Bracken Bower Prize, awarded to the best business book proposal by an author aged under 35. The prize, first awarded in 2014, has helped a number of young business writers to bring their ideas from proposal to publication...The shortlisted authors for the 2018 Bracken Bower Prize are:...Andrew Leon Hanna [`19]

U.S. President Donald Trump wants to rip up the rulebook for global trade. China is by many accounts abusing it...“What has changed is not the substance but rather the style of U.S. engagement,” said Harvard Law school professor Mark Wu. “The U.S. has made clear that it will continue to block new appointments to the Appellate Body until its long-standing concerns are addressed satisfactorily. I expect the U.S. to stand firm on this pledge, even if it means paralyzing the Appellate Body,” he said.

Lawrence Lessig was once best-known as the special master in the Microsoft Antitrust Case, then he was best known as the co-founder of Creative Commons, then as a fire-breathing corruption fighter: in America, Compromised, a long essay (or short nonfiction book), Lessig proposes as lucid and devastating a theory of corruption as you'll ever find, a theory whose explanatory power makes today's terrifying news cycle make sense -- and a theory that demands action.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. The U.S. has experienced a quiet revolution in the past 40 years. It began under Ronald Reagan but has been embraced by all of his successors, most notably Barack Obama, who doubled down on the basic idea: Before imposing new regulations, federal agencies must perform a cost-benefit analysis and demonstrate that the benefits justify the costs. In areas from highway safety to occupational health and from energy to homeland security, agencies are now required to develop a detailed, quantitative account of the likely effects of their proposals—and to offer that account to the American public.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. With the confirmation of Justice Brett Kavanaugh, a majority of U.S. Supreme Court justices have previously served as law clerks to other justices before them — an unprecedented situation on the court. The remarkable and perhaps unjustified rise of this elite-within-an-elite is worthy of discussion in its own right. But it also gives some context to last week’s revelation that the Heritage Foundation had planned a secretive boot camp for conservative law clerks about to start their jobs in the federal courts. It’s not just that the conservative think tank wanted to provide some counterweight to the comparatively liberal law school curriculum. Heritage was aiming to get a head start in its efforts to influence future judges.

Harvard law professor Cass Sunstein writes a lot of books, but he says his latest, The Cost-Benefit Revolution, is special. It’s the culmination of decades of writing and research Sunstein has done in administrative law, with particular attention to the way that agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency or the Food and Drug Administration translate laws into rules and regulation. Sunstein has been a vocal advocate of having agencies quantitatively compare the benefits of those rules and regulations to their costs, junking rules that don’t pass the bar and speeding through ones that do.

University of Chicago Philosophy Professor Martha C. Nussbaum said that society should grant enhanced legal protections for animals and reconsider the ethical principles governing human-animal interactions at a Friday talk in Boylston Hall...Man Ha Tse, an S.J.D. candidate studying at Harvard Law School, also said he found the talk worthwhile. “I think, probably, a majority of the population doesn’t even think of this as an issue that is worthy of serious scholarly intention,” she said, “So I always think it’s important to have serious scholars like Martha Nussbaum putting forward these ideas.

...In the new book “Tough Cases,” 13 trial judges from criminal, civil, probate, and family courts wrote candid and poignant firsthand accounts of the trials they can’t forget, giving readers a rare glimpse into their chambers. The book was the subject of a lively discussion at a panel sponsored by the Harvard Law School Library...“I don’t think I had ever really heard judges speak or write publicly about their thought processes and their tough cases the way this book captures,” said Andrew Crespo ’05, J.D. ’08, an assistant professor of law at Harvard Law School (HLS) and one of the panelists...Charles Fried, the Beneficial Professor of Law, said trial judges bear a heavy burden, not only because their work is lonely but because they have to steer their way through all facets of the human condition...For retired judge and HLS lecturer Nancy Gertner, “Tough Cases” reveals the challenges judges face and the need for the public to learn about them.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: I’m not proud of it. But I am one of those people who are more viscerally upset by the allegations that journalist Jamal Khashoggi died a brutal death at the hands of Saudi secret police than by the deaths of thousands of people under Saudi bombardment in Yemen. The reason isn’t that Khashoggi was a journalist or that he was a legal U.S. resident or that he may have been dismembered, possibly while still alive. It’s much simpler and much less principled than that: It’s because I knew him.

...Some observers, like Harvard Law’s Jeannie Suk Gersen, argue that Burroughs’s determination on that matter doesn’t necessarily need to include a broader ruling on affirmative action. But because the case is likely to be appealed, the case could have a drastic effect on how elite schools use race in admissions.

...Some legal experts do believe that the judiciary is feeling bolder than it once did, perhaps because of what they see as presidential overreach, perhaps because of Trump’s open hostility to the federal courts, reflected in his comment in 2017 about the “so-called” judge who first ruled against his travel ban and his reference to U.S. District Judge Gonzalo Curiel’s “Mexican heritage” when he was presiding over a case against Trump University. “Context matters,” as former federal judge and now Harvard Law School’s Nancy Gertner wrote in an article called “Judging in a Time of Trump.”