Media Mentions

U.S. Sens. Steve Daines, Cory Gardner, Mark Warner and Ron Wyden recently introduced the Internet of Things Cybersecurity Improvement Act of 2017 to address what they see as glaring security issues associated with IoT devices. The tech industry "has an insecurity dilemma," pointed out David O'Brien, senior researcher at Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. "Lots of devices and software are fundamentally insecure, and we've been unable to keep up with growing threats." The Mirai botnet -- crafted largely with hacked IoT devices -- and its distributed denial-of-service attacks on Dyn Inc. in Oct. 2016 temporarily disrupted much of the internet.

...The neighbors who are at war with the redeveloper of the former Middlesex County courthouse in East Cambridge have just received some help from a big name in constitutional law. Harvard Law School professor Laurence Tribe helped write a brief that the courthouse’s neighbors submitted to the Supreme Judicial Court earlier this month, asking the state’s highest court to reconsider its decision not to overturn an Appeals Court ruling in favor of the developer, Leggat McCall Properties. Essentially, the battle revolves around whether government immunity to local zoning rules should continue after a property moves into private ownership.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Spain’s Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy is playing with fire. Over the weekend, he announced he would invoke a never-used provision of the Spanish constitution to remove the elected leaders of Catalonia from office because of their support for Catalan independence. The provision, with antecedents going back to the Holy Roman Empire, is designed to avoid fundamental conflict between federal states and a central government. Had the U.S. Constitution included a similar rule, it might have helped avert the Civil War. But historically, invoking the right to put down a rogue state also poses a grave danger to federalism and even democracy itself, as it did when Germany last took a similar step, in 1932.

On MidPoint we air a recent speech by pioneering feminist law professor, Catharine MacKinnon of the University of Michigan, on social change through legal intervention; MacKinnon spoke Thursday at Stetson University College of Law in Gulfport, Florida. There are several instances of rape and sexual assault in the news: from Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein, to President Donald Trump to former Fox News host Bill O’Reilley and comedian Bill Cosby.

Last week, Tom Steyer, the billionaire progressive donor, announced a $10 million campaign calling for President Trump’s impeachment, beginning with a television commercial running in all 50 states...Appearing on screen, Steyer asks, “If that isn’t a case for impeaching and removing a dangerous president, then what has our government become?” It’s a good question...But as the Harvard Law scholar Cass Sunstein, author of the recent book “Impeachment: A Citizen’s Guide,” told me, that doesn’t mean Congress can impeach only a president who is caught breaking the law. “Crime is neither necessary nor sufficient,” said Sunstein, who emphasizes that his book is not about Trump.

Chinese billionaire Wang Shi visited Harvard over the weekend, delivering a sold-out lecture in Mandarin Chinese about his experiences in business and academia...Qingnan Xie, a visiting fellow at the Law School, said in Chinese that she has long been familiar with Wang as “one of the Chinese business celebrities” and came to the event because of her interest in his entrepreneurial achievements. “I am doing research on innovations in Chinese academia. Vanke represents a wave of newly-rising businesses based on accumulation of capital, and the real estate business is super lucrative in China. I also want to see what his expectations are of the Chinese market,” she said.

The largest proxy battle in U.S. history ended last week in a near tie, leaving Procter & Gamble without the clear support of its shareholders and activist shareholder Nelson Peltz without a board seat...The canard that activist shareholders promote short-term gains at the expense of long-term value has been utterly demolished by academic research. Harvard’s Lucian Bebchuk examined more than 2,000 activist events spanning 13 years and found that these interventions resulted in a 6% rise in stock prices on average and that targeted companies managed to hold on to these gains, above their benchmarks, over a five-year period.

...In the ninth episode of The Washington's Post "Constitutional" podcast, we explore the prison's origins and the pivotal court case, Gates v. Collier, in which Haber brought to light the constitutional violations that permeated Parchman Farm. This episode features the voices of Haber; Ron Sullivan, a professor at Harvard Law School and director of the Criminal Justice Institute; and David Oshinsky, author of “Worse Than Slavery” and a professor at New York University.

Former White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer spent three low-profile days on campus last week as part of his visiting fellowship at the Institute of Politics. Spicer attended several off-the-record meals with students, including a lunch on a political communications and a “Director’s dinner,” according to Jason Ge ’18 and Emily M. Hall ’18, co-chairs of the IOP Fellows and Study Groups Program. He also visited several classes, including a freshman seminar, and met with faculty and students from the College, Kennedy School, Business School, and Law School...Jeannette P. Leopold [`18], co-president of the Harvard Law School Republicans, attended a breakfast discussion with Spicer. “I thought it was really great that we had the opportunity to meet someone who’s been so influential,” she said.

An op-ed by Chiraag Bains. NFL players who have been protesting racism and police violence are under attack. Earlier this month, vice-president Mike Pence made a show of leaving a Colts-49ers game when twenty San Francisco players kneeled during the national anthem. Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones has threatened to bench any player who does not stand. Some fans have booed or burned jerseys. More important than the risk of being benched or booed, however, is the hijacking of the players’ message. Donald Trump has been the hijacker-in-chief. He has insisted that the protests disrespect the flag, the military, and “everything that we stand for.”

...The Law School’s Immigration and Refugee Clinic has been Harvard’s first line of defense against Trump’s anti-immigration policies, offering legal assistance to Harvard affiliates with immigration concerns and filing high-profile amicus briefs in cases challenging Trump's travel bans. Still, according to Patricia N. Manos, a graduate student and supporter of the unionization effort, some Harvard affiliates are unaware of the University’s legal resources for TPS recipients...Manos added that the University’s legal clinics are also open to Harvard employees and students’ families: “It's worth noting, and a lot of employees don't know this, that the legal clinic is interpreting the Harvard community pretty broadly,” she said.

An op-ed by Susan Crawford. Like the repeated hook of a pop song that you can’t get out of your head, mergers between the already-powerful wireless giants keep coming. In the previous greatest hits category of wireless consolidation, the Obama administration managed to stop the music for a while: Its DOJ blocked AT&T from buying T-Mobile in 2011, and a 2014 effort by Sprint to merge with T-Mobile was rebuffed by regulators. But the beat goes on, as rumors are swirling this month that Sprint and T-Mobile will soon announce plans to merge. This 2017 merger reprise—an attempt to revive the bad old days when harmful acquisitions were shooed past regulators—should also be soundly rejected.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. It was Richard Spencer’s party, and he can cry if he wants to. But the hecklers who shouted down the white supremacist Thursday at his University of Florida speech were invited guests, not government crashers. They held tickets distributed by Spencer’s own National Policy Institute. So they didn’t violate Spencer’s free speech rights by drowning him out with chants telling him to go home. Only the government is obligated to respect free speech rights -- and the university and law enforcement did everything by the book, to protect Spencer’s safety and preserve law and order outside the venue.

Two hours outside of D.C., near the Shenandoah Valley, 20 tiny houses sit on 80 acres of wooded land. Brooklyn-based Getaway brought them here after piloting its concept outside of Boston and New York. The idea? Put small cabins in remote locations near cities as a place to briefly disconnect. The co-founders, now backed with $15 million from Connecticut-based private equity firm L Catterton after a Series A that closed in February, opened reservations for D.C.-area residents earlier this month and, now, are preparing to welcome their first guest in about a week. The college friends and business partners, founder and CEO Jon Staff and co-founder Pete Davis [`18], started the company in 2015, when Staff was at Harvard Business School and Davis was at Harvard Law School.

With the deadline for public comment on the Department of Energy's controversial proposal to provide cost recovery for coal and nuclear power plants fast approaching, all sides have been weighing in. The DOE’s notice of public rulemaking (NOPR) is currently in the hands of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), which recently agreed to an expedited review period...In a filing this week, Ari Peskoe, a Harvard Law School senior fellow writing for the Harvard Environmental Policy Initiative, laid out a Iegal argument he discussed days after the NOPR first came out during an interview on The Interchange with GTM Research chief Shayle Kann. In simple terms, DOE hasn’t shown, or even proposed, that current wholesale rates in FERC-regulated jurisdictions are “unjust and unreasonable” or “unduly discriminatory” -- and without such a finding, FERC has no justification to act to change what’s already in place.

The Harvard Law Review launched a new online blog Tuesday aimed at providing more accessible, timely content alongside their usual long-form fare...“We’ve been publishing long-form, in-depth analysis in our print volume for over a century,” said Kathleen S. Shelton [`18], the Law Review's Blog Chair...Harvard Law professor Jack L. Goldsmith and legal journalist Benjamin Wittes wrote in a Tuesday post that the new medium will “foster better debates.” “Blogs are not, as they are often dismissed to be, shallow,” Goldsmith and Wittes wrote. “Of course they can be, just as an 80-page article can be. But to write well in this format, one must be expert enough to articulate the heart of an argument quickly and persuasively. That is not easy.”

Questions over the taxation of multinational corporations are putting strain on the relationship between the United States and the European Union, experts said at a Center for European Studies event Wednesday...The future of dialogue between the United States and the EU on tax issues has become more fraught in the wake of new international policies promoted by President Donald Trump’s administration, according to Stephen E. Shay, a senior lecturer at the Law School. “I think there is a lot of room for dialogue and for improving U.S. tax relations, but I’m not sure that the current administration is particularly interested in investing a lot of time and energy doing it,” Shay said.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. Karl Marx and his followers argued that revolutionaries should disrupt capitalist societies by "heightening the contradictions." Russia used a version of that Marxist idea in its efforts to disrupt the 2016 presidential campaign. It should come as no surprise that the most powerful nation from the former Soviet Union, whose leaders were schooled in the Marxist tradition, is borrowing directly from that tradition in its efforts today. What is more surprising, and far more important for American politics, is that President Donald Trump is drawn to a similar strategy.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The fall of Raqqa won’t be the last time you hear the words “Islamic State.” The name remains capable of inspiring acts of terrorism, and various groups fighting for territory in failed states around the world may continue to borrow the brand. But the collapse of the caliphate’s capital -- the last remaining symbol of Islamic State’s claim to control sovereign territory -- marks the end of what made the entity unique. Future historians will study how the capture of territory enabled what had been a ragtag group of Iraqi and a few Syrian jihadis to gain the attention and the imagination of supporters and opponents worldwide.

Students from schools across Harvard spent two hours debating the ideal qualities and priorities of the University’s next president at a forum hosted by the presidential search student advisory committee Wednesday evening...In the long-term, the committee plans to compile and send a report to the official search committee, composed of all twelve members of the Harvard Corporation and three members of the Board of Overseers, according to committee chair and Law School student Jyoti Jasrasaria ’12 [`18]. Jasrasaria said the group hopes to file its report by the end of 2017...“We are the second-ever student advisory committee, and it’s the first time we’ve ever done an event like this in Harvard’s history,” Jasrasaria said, referring to the committee’s decision to hold a public town hall to gather student perspectives on the search.

An op-ed by Mark Roe. It is considering replacing it with a solely court-based mechanism, which would be a mistake of potentially crisis-size proportions. Yes, creating a more streamlined bankruptcy process can reduce the decibel level of a bank’s failure and bankruptcy judges are experts at important restructuring tasks, but there are critical factors that cannot be ignored. Restructuring a mega-bank requires pre-planning, familiarity with its strengths and weaknesses, knowledge of how to time the bankruptcy properly in a volatile economy and the capacity to coordinate with foreign regulators.