Media Mentions

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. According to the most famous words of the First Amendment, “Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech.” But what did the founders understand those words to mean?

One in three students have thought about self-harm or suicide in the last 12 months while 70 per cent rate their mental health as “poor”, according to a study by Headspace... Harvard Law professor Jeanine Suk wrote in The New Yorker: “About a dozen new teachers of criminal law at multiple institutions have told me that they are not including rape law in their courses, arguing that it’s not worth the risk of complaints of discomfort by students.”

Twenty-three people were executed and 39 sentenced to death in 2017 in the US, one of the few developed countries to still use the death penalty... In one week this April, Arkansas killed four people despite legal challenges to three of the cases, which the Fair Punishment Project at Harvard Law School said had potent claims for mitigation. “One of the most disturbing features of the 2017 executions was the execution of prisoners who had never received meaningful review of important issues in their cases,” the report said. “At least five of those executed this year had received glaringly deficient legal representation or were denied substantial judicial review.”

Artificial intelligence is beginning to transform society, from babysitting children to self-driving cars. But, many scientists, including Professor Stephen Hawking, argue it may only be a matter of time before they gain consciousness and destroy mankind like something out of science fiction... But, a report by Human Rights Watch and the Harvard Law School International Human Rights Clinic has called for humans to remain in control of weapons at a time of rapid advancement. Senior arms division researcher at Human Rights Watch, Bonnie Docherty, said: "Machines have long served as instruments of war, but historically humans have directed how they are used."

Arpaio’s pardon unleashed a surge of criticism from lawyers, who argued the move undermined the independence of the judiciary. Jack Goldsmith, the Harvard Law professor and former head of the DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel in the President George W. Bush administration, called Trump’s decision an “irresponsible (but lawful) exercise of the presidential pardon power.”

The issue of sexual misconduct has emerged as a centerpiece of Democratic strategy for taking on President Trump and the Republican Party... Elizabeth Bartholet, the director of the child advocacy program and a professor at Harvard Law School, who is no fan of Donald Trump, wrote in an email: I think this is another moment we may look back on as a moment characterized by madness and sexual panic even though it is a moment that is important in recognizing serious abuses that deserve to be called out.

The audience could sense where the story was going almost as soon as Bryan Stevenson began telling it. Two black children in the barely desegregated South, hurtling with giddy, unguarded elation toward their first swim in a pool that until recently had been available only to whites... Nancy Gertner, a retired U.S. judge and senior lecturer at Harvard Law School, deplored the mandatory sentencing rules that reduce defendants to “the quantity of drugs, their criminal record, and nothing else.” ... Friendly professor of law Carol Steiker looked back at the past few hundred years of American death penalty laws.

Daniel L. Shapiro. White House national security advisor H.R. McMaster recently noted that the potential for war with North Korea increases “every day.” While many commentators blame mounting tensions on Pyongyang’s increasingly sophisticated military hardware, the ultimate problem is a human one. It is people who make decisions about military and political strategy, and human psychology is the ultimate arbiter of such decisions. Only by addressing the psychology of conflict can we stop the current march to battle.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Roy Moore won’t sit in the U.S. Senate -- or be expelled from it. I would like nothing more than to write his political eulogy. But I can’t -- not yet. The truth is, it’s too soon to count Moore out of Alabama politics. This is the same man who was twice removed from the chief justiceship of the state for defying the authority of the federal courts. He came back strong both times.

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].