Media Mentions

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. President Donald Trump has to decide what to do with an American who was fighting for Islamic State, captured by Kurdish forces in Syria and handed over this week to the U.S. military. The best solution is also the simplest: Charge him with material support for terrorism, convict him and lock him up in an appropriate U.S. prison for many, many years. In any sane, nonpartisan world, this decision would be a no-brainer. The other options are all flawed -- practically, or legally, or both.

From the Great Recession to Libor and PPI, money laundering to mis-sold rate swap deals, the world of finance has, in many cases, earned its crown of thorns. But Mihir Desai, the Mizuho Financial Group professor of finance at Harvard Business School, thinks bankers get a bad rap. I caught up with him on a recent trip to London to discuss his book, the Wisdom of Finance. There is, he says, a deep connection between morality and money. I suggest that given recent years, more than a few will disagree. “Oh of course they will, but that’s what I’m trying to change. In fact part of the idea of the title, the Wisdom of Finance, was to put together two words people don’t usually associate.”

The combination of huge amounts of personal data on all of us and tools to analyze it can do great good in medical and scientific applications. But the same technologies also threaten the social and political order of our country, critics say. Technology can be "the best and worst of times at the same time," said Harvard Law School professor (and former presidential candidate) Lawrence Lessig, speaking the Cloudflare Internet Summit Thursday in San Francisco. Lessig, who has long worried about the state of U.S. democracy, thinks that data science poses a new and dangerous threat.

The House this week quietly pushed aside some of the most controversial proposals in President Trump’s budget request...By throwing out an enormous initial proposal for non-defense cuts, Trump may have made it easier for Congress to adopt cuts that are nonetheless significant. Psychologists call the strategy “anchoring,” because it anchors the first number— in this case $54 billion in discretionary non-defense cuts — at the center of a negotiation. “It’s a hugely powerful tool, as behavioral economists and psychologists have proven,” says Gabriella Blum, a negotiations expert at Harvard Law School. “Once you throw a number out there, it serves as a very powerful anchor that your mind is drawn to. It forces the conversation around it.”

Today is "Constitution Day," marking the anniversary of the adoption of the US Constitution on September 17th, 1787. James Madison is considered the "father of the Constitution," and Harvard Law professor Noah Feldman is coming out with a new book about him in October titled, "The Three Lives of James Madison: Genius, Partisan, President." Feldman says James Madison was a politician with a long-term view. He wanted a government of the people, a republic, but not an empire. Madison left office more popular than any of his predecessor presidents. Feldman spoke at the Aspen Ideas Festival in Aspen, Colorado on June 26, 2017.

Despite rainy weather, crowds of Harvard Law School students, staff, faculty, alumni, and their families gathered in Jarvis Field Friday night for an event recognizing the school’s contributions to the arts as part of its bicentennial celebrations. The event, called “HLS in the Arts,” spanned two days and is one of the first in year-long series to celebrate the Law School’s 200th birthday...Richard J. Lazarus, a Law School professor and the faculty chair of the bicentennial planning committee, said that this year’s celebrations have been in the works since as early as 2014, when he began meeting with faculty, staff, and students to brainstorm ideas for how best to commemorate this milestone in the school’s history. His said his intention was for the school to spend the year recalling its own achievements, but instead actively showing what makes it so “iconic.”

An essay by Andrew Crespo. Last week, I wrote an op-ed in The Boston Globe suggesting that a private attorney should be appointed to challenge the constitutionality of former Sheriff Joseph Arpaio’s pardon—a suggestion that has now been formally presented to the judge in Arpaio’s case. This week, Arpaio, through his attorney, threatened to sue me if I did not issue a retraction...Given the tendency of late for our political leaders to threaten lawsuits as a way to try to suppress speech that they find critical or unflattering, I have decided to publish here the complete letter that I received from Mr. Arpaio’s attorney, along with my response.

An op-ed by Stephen Davis. Alexion Pharmaceuticals Inc.'s big announcement Tuesday that it will pull up stakes and relocate to Boston could well be about planting itself in a more fertile biotech environment, as CEO Ludwig Hantson asserted on a conference call Tuesday with market analysts. But it could also be something else: an expensive exercise in corporate misdirection — that is, doing something shiny and new to distract observers from the ugly and old. If so, New Haven and environs will wind up paying a steep price in lost jobs so Alexion can buy time ahead of financial woes and investigations.

The NBC Latino 20 honors achievers who are making our communities and our nation better...The first-ever Latino president of the Harvard Law Review, Andrew Manuel Crespo has clerked at the Supreme Court and represented children as a public defender. He has seen firsthand the chasm between our legal ideals and the reality on the ground. "We've told ourselves that whether you are imprisoned for years should not depend on whether you are rich or poor," says the Harvard Law professor, "but any lawyer who has set foot in a courtroom would probably agree that resources and money do make a tremendous difference."

When Education Secretary Betsy DeVos last week announced plans to revise the nation’s guidelines on campus sexual assault, the predictable din of outrage drowned out the applause from some unlikely corners of college campuses: Many liberals actually approve...“Betsy DeVos and I don’t have many overlapping normative and political views,” said Janet Halley, a Harvard Law School professor and expert on sexual harassment who supports the change. “But I’m a human being, and I’m entitled to say what I think.”...Also among them were four feminist professors who wrote a letter to the Department of Education last month beseeching DeVos’s department for a revision of the rule. Definitions of sexual wrongdoing are now far too broad, they wrote...The authors — Halley, Elizabeth Bartholet, Nancy Gertner, and Jeannie Suk Gersen — have all researched, taught, and written about sexual assault and feminist legal reform for years. Halley, who has represented both accusers and the accused in campus cases, said her colleagues maintain universities should have robust programs against sexual assault.

A Christian group is threatening legal action if the Walsh administration doesn’t allow a religious flag to be raised on City Hall Plaza — the same spot they say where banners from “communist” nations as well as transgender and pride colors are set to fly...Mark Tushnet, a Harvard law professor, said the city’s interpretation that flying the flag on a city flagpole could be viewed as an endorsement would, in his opinion, hold water with a judge. “I think it’s much more likely for people to think if it’s on the city flagpole, then the city must be standing behind it,” he said. “If that’s right, then the city in my view is entitled to say no.”

Last week, Facebook disclosed to congressional investigators that it sold $100,000 worth of advertisements to a troll farm connected to the Kremlin surrounding the U.S. presidential election. These advertisements, which targeted voters with divisive political content, added even more evidence of Russia’s attempts to meddle with the election. But they also contributed to a larger conversation about free speech in an era where social-media posts replace political pamphlets and the public square has increasingly moved into cyberspace....Susan Benesch, a faculty associate at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society and the founding director of the Dangerous Speech Project, likewise falls in this camp. “If you deceive people consistently and on a large scale, you are probably damaging their willingness to engage as citizens in our democracy,” she says. She believes that the public should continue to pressure tech companies to create some mechanism for oversight as to what content is taken offline.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. It is mid-September, and the Trump administration still has no website for its Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. That is astonishing. It is also a disservice to the American people.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Cake baking is an art. Or, so says a group of professional wedding cake bakers who have filed a friend of the court brief with the U.S. Supreme Court in what promises to be the blockbuster case of the upcoming term, Masterpiece Cakeshop Ltd. v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission. The brief is obviously intended to support the claim of a baker to be exempt from anti-discrimination laws that say he must serve gay customers. It’s all together reasonable to think that a professional baker is an artist. The thing is, that shouldn’t matter. Artists are just like anyone else who has a business open to the public: They have to comply with anti-discrimination laws.

It’s no secret that the Trump administration is corporation-friendly to a fault. For all the talk of the underserved coal miners and workers whose jobs have been stolen by free trade agreements or China, the Oval Office has not been a friendly — or even safe — place for workers in the past eight months. We’ve already reported on the discontinuation of a number of worker safety programs and regulations but there’s much more to Trump’s undercutting of the fundamental rights of American workers going on. We talked with Sharon Block, the executive director of the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School, about what’s on her radar as the Trump machine moves quickly forward. In Block’s 20-year career, she’s worked for the National Labor Relations Board and most recently served as the head of the policy office at the Department of Labor under President Obama. She and her team were, in fact, responsible for many of the policies being undercut or discarded by the new crew in town.

An op-doc produced by Rebecca Richman Cohen. Our harsh treatment of sex offenders is based on flawed social science.

Of the smorgasbord of features stuffed into Apple's new thousand-dollar iPhone X, one of the most intriguing is Face ID — a new feature that lets you unlock your iPhone with your gaze after the system has learned what you look like, using Apple’s first-ever neural engine. “In the iPhone X, your phone is locked — until you look at it, and it recognizes you," Phil Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of worldwide marketing, said onstage at today’s iPhone event. “Nothing has ever been simpler, more natural, and effortless.”...Meanwhile, Bruce Schneier, an internet security expert and chief technology officer at Resillient Systems, a subsidiary of IBM, said Apple’s “one in a million” failure claim may well hold up — but that it doesn’t matter if even one person in a million is still able to break into your phone. “That’s why [security] professionals don’t unlock phones that way,” Schneier wrote to BuzzFeed News in an email.

As thousands of students armed with smartphones start the new school year, they’ll have plenty of social media options to choose from to find friends and connect with their peers. But at a select group of college campuses, a new player has entered the scene -- a student-centered networking app called Islands...Rey Junco, a fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard, agreed with Isenberg that anonymity can be a force for good. Junco’s research has focused on how social media affects young people’s psychological development. He said that while he understands the reservations about anonymity, he believes it is important for young people to be able to explore different identities in a safe way. “Let’s say someone is exploring an LGBT identity, or a nonmajority religious identity -- anonymity can allow you explore that without the danger that is inherent in doing that elsewhere,” said Junco.

In a judicial nominee hearing last week, Senator Diane Feinstein questioned whether the nominee's adherence to Catholic teaching should prevent her from a federal appointment. Less than twenty-four hours later, former White House strategist Steve Bannon lambasted the Catholic bishops for their support for DACA. Some have wondered if the two incidents indicate an uptick in anti-Catholic bias in the United States...These two cases - which happened in the span of one, shared 24-hour news cycle - have prompted some to wonder if anti-Catholic bias on both the political left and the right in America is on the rise. According to Adrian Vermeule, professor of constitutional law at Harvard University, “hostility comes in different varieties.” “Feinstein’s hostility is a kind of myopia, blind to the fact that liberalism is itself a structure of dogma,” said Vermeule.

More than two dozen Law School students staged a sit in outside offices where students were interviewing for positions in the U.S. military Tuesday in protest of President Donald Trump’s announcement that transgender people may not serve in the military. The protest, organized by HLS Lambda and Queer/Trans People of Color, took place over the course of the day as the U.S. Army and Air Force conducted interviews for their JAG corps, which allows students to serve in the military while completing their legal education...Han Park [`18], the co-President of Lambda, the school’s BGLTQ student group, said that the groups leading the sit-in wanted to bring public attention to the issue. “We’ve had a dialogue with the school and said, ‘Listen, if you’re going to have an anti-discrimination policy in place, live up to it, or else don’t take the money, or do something else with the money,’” Park said. “That’s the conversation we’re going to be having, but we’re today, right outside the interview rooms, just to kind of show a physical presence saying that we don’t agree with this policy.”

An op-ed by Diane Rosenfeld. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos last week announced a retreat from the Education Department’s work to protect students from sexual assault. While demonstrating that she has given serious thought to the issue, DeVos’s position is based on two fundamental flaws. As a result, she is poised to abandon laudable work done in the previous administration to help schools reduce the incidence of campus rape.