Media Mentions

Amid the unwelcome glare of the Sept. 11 shooting death of Carlos Munoz Portal — a Narcos location scout killed on the job in the rural region north of Mexico City — Netflix must also contend with an ongoing trademark dispute with the family of Pablo Escobar, the Colombian drug kingpin dramatized in the hit series...According to Rebecca Tushnet, a Harvard Law School professor who focuses on copyright and trademark law, it's unlikely that Escobar Inc. could have a trademark claim to "Narcos" — a word which has come to mean anyone involved in the drug-cartel trade. "It's possible to have trademarks that are the same for different goods and services. For example; Delta Airlines, Delta Dental, Delta Faucet," Tushnet says. "But at least some of the goods and services in the applications are overlapping.

An op-ed by Chiraag Bains. In January 2012, Sheriff Doug Gillespie of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department sent a team to Washington, D.C. to ask the Justice Department for help. The LVMPD had been the subject of a five-part series published by the Las Vegas Review-Journal just months before. The paper’s investigation covered 20 years of shootings by the department. It concluded that many of the incidents were avoidable and accused the LVMPD of being an “insular” agency that celebrated “a hard-charging police culture while often failing to learn from its mistakes.” Two weeks after the last piece ran, an LVMPD officer killed an unarmed, mentally ill, black veteran.

...the guests were witnessing the product of a clever and thoughtful arts collaboration between Clayton and the Harvard Art Museums. This year’s celebration was the fourth iteration of the popular event, which draws many returning students as well as a plethora of freshmen. The autumnal festivity introduces students to the museums and highlights the role that they can play in their lives...It was the first time at the museums for Harvard Law School students Cortney Robinson ’18 and Demarquin Johnson ’20. “I thought it was a good chance to be introduced to the museum,” said Robinson.

An interview with Noah Feldman. An Intelligence Squared debate about the most pressing global challenges facing the Trump administration. Prominent foreign policy experts debate what to do about North Korea, and our strategic relationships with China and other countries.

An essay by Jeannie Suk Gersen. In 2015, Laura Kipnis, a film-studies professor at Northwestern University, published a polemic in The Chronicle of Higher Education titled “Sexual Paranoia Strikes Academe.” Kipnis argued that students’ sense of vulnerability on campus was expanding to an unwarranted degree, partly owing to new enforcement policies around Title IX, which prohibits sex discrimination at educational institutions that receive federal funds. The new Title IX policies on sexual misconduct which were then sweeping campuses perpetuated “myths and fantasies about power,” Kipnis wrote, which enlarged the invasive power of institutions while undermining the goal of educating students in critical thinking and resilience. “If you wanted to produce a pacified, cowering citizenry, this would be the method,” she concluded.

An article by Glenn Cohen, Sharona Hoffman, and Eli Y. Adashi. The mugger's demand “Your money or your life” is a familiar one. However, in an era of vast hospital computer networks and electronic health records, a novel risk to worry about is, “Your money or your patient's life.” This threat, known as “ransomware,” is an increasingly common experience for computer users around the world. The relevance of this hazard to health care became widely apparent on 12 May 2017 after a global attack effected by ransomware named WannaCry. Among those most severely affected were hospitals, pharmacies, and clinics of the British National Health Service.

If President Trump spoke with Paul Manafort while his former campaign manager was being wiretapped, experts say there's no quick legal route to disclose the existence or content of intercepted calls. Public disclosure isn't guaranteed because two reported wiretap orders targeting Manafort were issued under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, rather than via the ordinary criminal wiretap statute...Former federal judge Nancy Gertner, a senior lecturer at Harvard Law School, said "the transcript will not be released unless there is an indictment and a public trial."

Harvard unveiled the list of students who will formally weigh in on the University’s ongoing presidential search Tuesday—the last of three advisory committees the search committee promised to appoint after University President Drew G. Faust announced she will step down next summer. Third-year Law student and Cabot House tutor Jyoti Jasrasaria ’12 [`18] will chair the 18-member committee, which includes at least one representative from each of Harvard’s 12 degree-granting schools. Students will “provide advice to the presidential search committee” and “assist in ensuring broad outreach to the wider Harvard community,” according to the announcement.

Vanguard Group needs its hands-off investor base to pay attention. On Nov. 15 the world’s largest mutual fund company will stage its broadest shareholder meeting in eight years and needs enough individual investors to vote on measures such as installing three new fund board members including Tim Buckley, who is set to take over as Vanguard chief executive in January....Stephen Davis, a senior fellow at Harvard Law School, said fund governance rules, dating from 1940, could use an update to give investors more regular input. As things stand now, Vanguard’s investors “are not acclimated to participating,” he said. “There’s no track record of them having to do that.”

A School of Public Health student is among a half dozen undocumented young people suing President Donald Trump over his move to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. Filed in a San Francisco federal court Monday, the lawsuit charges that the Trump administration violated the due process rights of young people protected from deportation under DACA...The lawsuit’s other plaintiffs include two middle school teachers who work with at-risk youth, a formerly homeless attorney, a Ph.D. candidate in clinical psychology, and a law student. Harvard Law professor Laurence H. Tribe ’62 is on the legal team providing the Dreamers pro bono counsel.

Joe Arpaio might have been able to stay out of prison after President Trump pardoned him last month, but that doesn’t mean the controversial former Arizona sheriff has free rein to harass his critics. Arpaio, who had been convicted of contempt for ignoring a federal judge’s order to stop targeting undocumented immigrants, is threatening action against a Harvard Law School professor in a clear effort to use legal threats to deter opponents. The professor, Andrew Manuel Crespo, wrote a column in this newspaper earlier this month calling for the appointment of a special prosecutor to challenge the pardon on constitutional grounds. In Crespo’s view, Trump’s pardon may have been unconstitutional because it interfered with the judiciary’s ability to protect constitutional rights.

An op-ed by Samantha Power. When George Washington gave his Farewell Address in 1796, he urged the American people “to be constantly awake” to the risk of foreign influence. In the wake of Russia’s meddling in the 2016 United States election, the president’s warning has a fresh, chilling resonance. The debate in the United States about foreign interference concentrates on who did what to influence last year’s election and the need for democracies to strengthen their cybersecurity for emails, critical infrastructure and voting platforms. But we need to pay far more attention to another vulnerability: our adversaries’ attempts to subvert our democratic processes by aiming falsehoods at ripe subsets of our population — and not only during elections.

When the Trump administration announced on Sept. 5 that it intended to upend the Deferred Action on Childhood Arrivals program (DACA), which has banned deportation of many young immigrants, the move seemed to set a general course for what would come next...Opening the discussion on “DACA: What’s Next,” moderator Dan Balz, chief correspondent for the Washington Post and a fall resident fellow at the IOP, summarized recent developments, asking the panel members — Carlos Rojas, an immigrant rights advocate and special projects consultant for Youth on Board; Roberto G. Gonzalez, assistant professor of education, Harvard Graduate School of Education; and Jason Corral, staff attorney, Harvard Immigration and Refugee Clinical program — for their take on the social media back and forth...The DACA program itself was a compromise, said Corral, just as the BRIDGE Act, legislation now before Congress that would essentially legalize DACA, is a compromise. Calling the administration’s initial decision to suspend DACA “discriminatory, racist, nationalist,” Corral said, “It’s not the people that are broken, it’s the immigration law that is broken.”

An op-ed by Ryan Goodman and Alex Whiting. The International Criminal Court very recently issued an arrest warrant for a militia leader in Libya which should catch the attention of U.S. policymakers, diplomats and prosecutors because of the possibility that his most senior commander—an American citizen by the name of Khalifa Haftar—ordered soldiers to commit war crimes. So has General Haftar been telling his subordinates to carry out the very acts that are part of the International Court’s arrest warrant, such as summary executions?

An op-ed by Laurence Tribe and Ron Fein. A federal judge in Arizona will soon consider whether to overturn President Trump’s pardon of former Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio. The answer to this question has consequences not just for Arpaio and the people he hurt but also for the entire country. And although the conventional legal wisdom has been that a presidential decision to grant a pardon is unreviewable, that is wrong. In this circumstance, Trump’s decision to pardon Arpaio was unconstitutional and should be overturned.

It’s not surprising that Special Counsel Robert Mueller is interested in the role Facebook played in Russia’s campaign to influence the 2016 election. Yet, the news that broke over the weekend that his team had obtained a search warrant to access information about Facebook’s recently disclosed Russia-linked ad spending is the clearest sign yet of the breadth of his probe, the pace at which its moving along and what kind of case he might be trying to build, regardless of whether he ultimately brings criminal charges...Getting a search warrant is a higher bar for Mueller to clear than a grand jury subpoena, another tool Mueller is using to obtain documents and testimony. “To get a search warrant like that, you have to show a judge that there is probable cause that evidence of a crime will be found at the location,” said Harvard Law professor and former federal prosecutor Alex Whiting.

The technologist who ran Donald Trump's automated ad campaign on Facebook says "unsupervised" software can bring out the best and worst of humanity. Darren Bolding, chief technology officer of Cambridge Analytica, told the crowd at the third annual Internet Summit in San Francisco on Thursday that "algorithms will find the worst in us if you let them go nuts." His comments came during an interview onstage with Harvard University law professor Lawrence Lessig in front of several hundred people gathered to hear him discuss the campaign.

Almost nothing is publicly known about the American ISIS fighter who is now in the custody of the U.S. military, but one fact has already made the case extraordinary: The Trump Administration has declared him an enemy combatant, according to a military spokesman...The designation of the American ISIS fighter as an enemy combatant would become more consequential if the Trump administration seeks to detain him indefinitely under that status, legal experts say. If that happens, "then it's a big deal," said Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard Law School professor and former Bush administration lawyer.

A Pennsylvania federal judge on Thursday appointed Harvard Law School professor William B. Rubenstein to address several questions surrounding attorneys’ fees payouts in the uncapped NFL concussion settlement, overruling concerns that his involvement may create a conflict of interest...U.S. District Judge Anita B. Brody said Rubenstein must conclude whether a cap can and should be implemented in relation to the percentage any class member must pay his attorney, while also making a determination on how high the cap should be...

Easing challenges created for veterans who receive “bad paper” discharges will require changes in practices and procedures at the departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs, some experts said Friday...Dana Montalto, a fellow at Harvard Law School, is petitioning for change to VA regulations concerning veterans with other-than-honorable discharges. The VA in July began providing urgent mental health care to those veterans – aid that wasn’t available previously. Though VA Secretary David Shulkin’s announcement was a shift in how government officials talked about veterans with bad paper, critics argued the policy didn’t go far enough.

Facebook lives and dies by its algorithms. They decide the order of posts in your News Feed, the ads you see when you open the app, and which which news topics are trending. Algorithms make its vast platform possible, and Facebook can often seem to trust them completely—or at least thoughtlessly. On Thursday, a pitfall of that approach became clear. ProPublica revealed that people who buy ads on Facebook can choose to target them at self-described anti-Semites...To Jonathan Zittrain, a professor of law at Harvard University, that story suggests the entire way that tech companies currently sell ads online might need an overhaul. “For categories with tiny audiences, with titles drawn from data that Facebook users themselves enter—such as education and interests—it may amount to a tree falling in a forest that no one hears,” he said.