Media Mentions

Forget about today's modest incremental advances in artificial intelligence, such as the increasing abilities of cars to drive themselves. Waiting in the wings might be a groundbreaking development: a machine that is aware of itself and its surroundings, and that could take in and process massive amounts of data in real time...'Machines have long served as instruments of war, but historically humans have directed how they are used,' said Bonnie Docherty, senior arms division researcher at Human Rights Watch, in a statement. 'Now there is a real threat that humans would relinquish their control and delegate life-and-death decisions to machines.'

Americans waste a lot of food — about 133 billion pounds a year, or roughly one-third of all the food produced in the U.S. In addition to wasting money and squandering a precious resource, all that waste creates an enormous environmental problem. Food waste often winds up in landfills, where it rots and releases large quantities of methane, a potent greenhouse gas that contributes to global warming...Emily Broad Leib, director of the Food Law and Policy Clinic at Harvard Law School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, said the plan has promise. “In particular, one of the challenges with anaerobic digestion has been that many AD facilities are unwilling or unable to process food scraps at this time,” Leib told MACH in an email. “If this process is tailored specifically to utilize food scraps… that could help to increase capacity to process food scraps and really fill that gap, especially if it is cost-effective.”

A court-appointed expert brought in to address several questions surrounding attorneys’ fees payouts in the uncapped NFL concussion settlement recommended Monday that the Pennsylvania federal court overseeing the settlement should cap contingency fees for individual attorneys at 15 percent and scrap another request to set aside 5 percent of settlement awards to compensate future work in administering the settlement. Harvard Law School professor William B. Rubenstein submitted his final report to the the court, arguing that the “recommendations strike a proper balance between fairly compensating the lawyers for the services that they have provided — or will provide — while ensuring that the absent class members do not pay fees that are, in total, unreasonable.”

An op-ed by S.J.D. candidate Fady Khoury. The so-called temporary nature of Israel’s control over the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza has for too long served as a justification for not extending them full political and civil rights. The Oslo peace process entailed a Palestinian acceptance of “the right of the State of Israel to exist in peace and security,” while in return Israel only recognized the Palestinian Liberation Organization as “the representative of the Palestinian people.” Israel has never recognized Palestine or the Palestinians’ right to an independent state in the occupied territories. To this day, Israel has never formally recognized the Palestinian people’s right to independence in any internationally binding document.

The Trump administration has paused processing claims to help borrowers who say they’ve been duped by their schools...To be one of the thousands of borrowers waiting in limbo for a determination of their claim is “terrible,” said Toby Merrill, the director of the Project on Predatory Student Lending at Harvard Law School, which represents former for-profit college students who’ve been harmed by their schools.

Meticulous research, deep study of case law, and intricate argument-building—lawyers have used similar methods to ply their trade for hundreds of years. But they’d better watch out, because artificial intelligence is moving in on the field...Adam Ziegler, the managing director of the Harvard Law School Library Innovation Lab, wants to remove this barrier to entry. He has helped lead the CaseLaw Access Project, an effort to digitize the entire historical record of U.S. court opinions and make that data available for legal algorithms to read and train on. “I think there will be a lot more experimentation and the progress will accelerate,” Ziegler says about the impact of this project. “It’s really hard to build a smart interface if you can’t get to the basic data.”

A Harvard professor who reviewed the attorney fee request in the $1 billion concussion litigation settlement with the NFL has recommended placing limits on potential recovery for lawyers. Harvard Law School professor William Rubenstein issued a 47-page report Monday recommending that a presumptive 15 percent cap be set on all contingent fee contracts for attorneys representing former players individually. He also rejected arguments that parties should pay an additional 5 percent set-aside toward a common benefit fund for class counsel attorneys working to implement the settlement program. Rubenstein was asked earlier this year by the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania to vet the lump-sum fee request in the case. “It is my expert opinion that my recommendations strike a proper balance between fairly compensating the lawyers for the services that they have provided—or will provide—while ensuring that the absent class members do not pay fees that are, in total, unreasonable,” Rubenstein said.

An article by Annette Gordon-Reed. The documents most closely associated with the creation of the United States—the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution—present a problem with which Americans have been contending from the country’s beginning: how to reconcile the values espoused in those texts with the United States’ original sin of slavery, the flaw that marred the country’s creation, warped its prospects, and eventually plunged it into civil war.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. It’s no surprise that U.S. President Donald Trump’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital has sparked violence in the West Bank and Beirut, or even protests in far-flung Indonesia, which is majority Muslim. But Sweden? Yet the western Swedish city of Gothenburg, headquarters of Volvo Car AB, saw the firebombing of a synagogue on Friday. The same evening, demonstrators in Malmö, in Sweden’s far south, called for their own “intifada” and threatened to shoot Jews.

Harvard and Yale law schools cast a long shadow over clerk hiring by the Supreme Court justices—and it’s growing longer. Based on the National Law Journal’s analysis of clerk hires from 2005 to 2017, 50 percent of all Supreme Court law clerks in the past 13 years graduated from either Harvard or Yale, compared to 40 percent in a similar study 20 years ago...Harvard law professor Richard Lazarus insists there’s a reason for Harvard’s dominance: ”The students who get into this place are extraordinarily gifted. They are gifted academically. They are gifted in life experiences. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t students at other schools who are as good as the Harvard and Yale students. There are. But the concentration we have here is, I think, unparalleled.”

An op-ed by Jordan Brennan. Economic commentators have been puzzling over North America's persistently weak inflation. Conventional economic theory posits that tightening labour markets should lead to higher levels of inflation, as employers bid up wages in an effort to attract and retain workers. So why haven't we seen an increase in inflationary pressure? One reason the social sciences tend to trail the natural sciences in terms of predictive power is the absence of laboratories. While natural scientists can isolate and manipulate variables in a manner that better enables them to pinpoint causal force, social scientists typically lack this capacity.

To our students and the wider HLS community, We write to condemn a series of acts by President Trump that incite violence and are inconsistent with a democratic legal order. On November 29th, the President circulated unverified videos that explicitly vilified members of a religious community as dangerous. In his tweet, the videos appeared without any comment, context, or explanation, as if the fact that they concerned “Muslim” actors itself established their relevance. In that way, the videos justified hostility towards individuals on the ground of their faith alone. The President’s message further endorsed violence insofar as it expressly retweeted, thus apparently approving, a source convicted of religiously aggravated harassment...Christine Desan, Tomiko Brown-Nagin, John Coates [and 78 more HLS faculty and administrators].

For the past 30 years, lawyer and social activist Bryan Stevenson ’85 has battled through the courts, defending wrongly convicted death-row prisoners and children prosecuted as adults, while condemning mass incarceration, excessive sentences, and racial bias in the criminal justice system...Delivering the 2017 Tanner Lecture on Human Values on Wednesday, Stevenson announced a planned memorial to honor more than 4,000 victims of lynching in the U.S. and a museum that traces the country’s history of racial inequality from enslavement to mass incarceration...Afterward, Homi K. Bhabha, director of the Humanities Center, led a panel discussion on the issues of mass incarceration, racial injustice, and the death penalty. Among the panelists were Nancy Gertner, senior lecturer on law at the Law School and a retired U.S. district judge; Tommie Shelby, Caldwell Titcomb Professor in the Department of African and African American Studies and the Department of Philosophy, and Carol S. Steiker, Henry J. Friendly Professor of Law at the Law School. Reflecting on her years on the bench, Gertner criticized mandatory minimum sentencing, a legal trend that was a product of the war on drugs that led to the surge in the number of African-Americans in the federal prison population...Steiker spoke about the history of the death penalty in the United States and talked about its racial basis. The United States is the only Western democracy that uses capital punishment, she said, and is a leader internationally in doing so.

On Monday, Nov. 6, Khizr Khan promoted his new book, “An American Family: A Memoir of Hope and Sacrifice,” at First Parish Church in Harvard Square. Khan, a Pakistani-American lawyer and Gold Star father, is best known for denouncing then-presidential candidate Donald Trump in a rousing speech at the 2016 Democratic National Convention. Khan discussed the contents of his memoir with Harvard Law School professor Martha Minow before taking questions from the audience.

...The 2017 Republican House and Senate tax plans—currently being negotiated into a single package via reconciliation between the two chambers—are not 1986 reform. Likely no corporate lobbyist will be crying in a committee room if and when Donald Trump signs a finished bill. In part, that’s because both plans stuff new temporary business tax cuts into the code. For years to come, K Streeters will be selling their influence to get key politicians to renew them every few years. These temporary provisions—known as “tax extenders”—include an expiration date...Progressive author and Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig has called it “one of the most efficient machines for printing money for politicians that Washington has ever created.”

In a 2006 book called “The Wealth of Networks: How social production transforms markets and freedom” (Yale University Press), Yochai Benkler theorized that the internet would bring about a revolution that will democratize access to power...In the following eleven years Facebook, Apple, Amazon, and Alphabet, Google’s parent company, have become global behemoths, collecting in their way an unfathomable wealth of users’ data. At the same time, there were those who learned how to manipulate the data available and use the internet to spread misinformation. These are the issues that occupy Mr. Benkler, now a Law professor at Harvard and the co-director of the university’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. "The attitude in Silicon Valley is that if we want it hard enough, technology can solve every problem. In reality, these companies and entrepreneurs are creating very centralized systems without being aware of the risks because they consider themselves to be ‘the good guys,’” says Benkler in an interview with Calcalist.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. One of the most spectacularly successful ideas in all of behavioral economics is Save More Tomorrow, by which employers ask employees if they would like to give some portion of their future wage increases to their retirement plans. An equally intriguing but largely untried idea is Give More Tomorrow, by which people take steps to increase their charitable donations – in the future. For nonprofits, employers and individuals, the holiday season would be a terrific time to take advantage of that idea.

Any American who wants to follow the twists and turns of the Russia investigation quickly runs up against how well they understand the nuanced, sometimes opaque legal process. Like the grand jury. A grand jury is how special counsel Robert S. Mueller III charged President Trump's former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, and Manafort's right-hand man, Rick Gates, with fraud and financial crimes. But grand juries are shrouded in secrecy — necessarily so, as it turns out...It's supposed to be that way, said Alex Whiting, a former federal prosecutor and current professor at Harvard Law. If you started allowing witnesses to defend themselves in a grand jury, then suddenly you're holding something that more closely resembles a trial. Plus, Whiting said, the mere existence of grand juries act as a check on prosecutors.

George Lucas probably had no idea that Star Wars, his story about a moisture farmer going on an adventure, would change the course of storytelling. Memorable characters sure help set it apart from other science fiction, but Harvard Law professor Cass Sunstein has good idea as to why it's such a global phenomenon. The original trilogy, he states, has something in it for everyone in that it tackles some very human problems: redemption, authoritarianism, and the appeal of darkness.

Harvard Law School’s student government leaders signed a pledge to improve mental health at the school, joining student leadership from 12 other top law schools...Student government president Adrian D. Perkins [`18] and vice president Amanda Lee [`18] wrote, along with the other signees, that each school plans to broaden their mental health outreach efforts through their own initiatives and in association with other campus student groups. This pledge follows the Law School’s distribution of a survey last month meant to gauge the status of student mental health at the school...“We wanted to have some baseline data for our community as well and Harvard’s quite different from a lot of schools because we’re just so large,” Lee said. “Having that information is really important for advocating for better services.”

In an era when too many people remain suspicious of vaccines, one of the world’s largest manufacturers may have made matters worse while trying to control dengue fever. For the past two weeks, Sanofi has been engulfed by scandal in the Philippines after disclosing that its Dengvaxia vaccine could worsen — rather than prevent — future cases of the mosquito-borne virus in people who had not previously been infected. About 830,000 children in the Philippines were vaccinated; now the government is demanding a $59 million refund and probing whether the vaccine was approved improperly...And to restore confidence in vaccines, a reckoning is required. “At a time when convincing people to be vaccinated has encountered increasing resistance, it’s really unfortunate to have this story emerge,” said Glenn Cohen, a Harvard Law School professor who is an expert in health law and bioethics. “The company owes a full accounting of what it knew and when.”